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

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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