Page 450 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

The artist who so successfully evoked that rar-
efied life was himself a professional painter of no
formal education; he seems to have acquired cul-
tural literacy mostly through association with the
Suzhou collectors and artists who were his
friends, peers, and patrons. Probably born some-
time in the 14905, Qiu studied painting with Zhou
Chen, and met such other Suzhou luminaries as
Tang Yin, Wu Kuan, Zhu Yunming and, at least
by 1517, Wen Zhengming. Qiu became especially
famed for his paintings of classical subjects in a
variety of styles, from facsimile copies of antique
originals to, as here, freer and more creative
transformations of traditional themes.
The present painting bears the collection seals
of Xiang Yuanbian (1525-1590), a major patron
and collector with whom Qiu often stayed during
the final decade of his life. Xiang and his elder
brothers were ardent collectors of earlier painting,
and during the years Qiu lived with the family he
was, according to Xiang's grandson, able to see
more than one thousand Song and Yuan dynasty
paintings. Xiang Yuanbian first mentioned Qiu in
an inscription written in the year 1547, when he
himself was twenty-two years of age, and the
present work probably dates from about that time
as well. The unusually large size of the painting,
and the use of a paper ground rather than the silk
that Qiu seems to have preferred for more tech-
nically polished large works, suggest that the
painting was commissioned directly by Xiang and
was intended to associate its owner with the lite-
rati class to which that businessman aspired.
By reason of virtually identical size, seals,
mediums, subject, and style, Passing a Summer
Day in the Shade of Banana Palms is paired with
another hanging scroll in the National Palace
Museum, entitled Conversation in the Shade of
Firmiana Trees. The two are usually described as
the extant half of a set of four paintings depicting
different views in each of the four seasons. In
such a set the present painting would have been
the summer scene, and the Firmiana Trees —trees
which lose their leaves each fall—would have rep-
resented autumn. The set must have been broken
up some time before the late eighteenth century,
for Banana Palms is recorded in the Imperial Col-
lection catalogue of 1793, but Firmiana Trees does
not appear in the Imperial Collection until the
catalogue of 1816 and hence probably entered
the palace at a somewhat later date. In neither
catalogue are the paintings associated with one
another or described as parts of a set. An intrigu-
ing question about the nature of the postulated set
and the possible survival of the two lost scrolls is
posed by a Qiu Ying painting now in the Shanghai
Museum. Entitled Wang Xizhi Inscribing a Fan,
x
that work measures 280.5 99-^ cm was a so
l
'
painted in ink and color on paper, and bears the
same collector seals of Xiang Yuanbian as the pair
in Taiwan. If the very close similarity between
these three paintings can be taken to indicate that
they once belonged together, then the location of
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