some rocks in early chinese painting

Some Rocks in Early Chinese PaintingAuthor(s): James CahillSource: Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, Vol. 16 (1962), pp. 77-87Published by: University of Hawai'i Press for the Asia SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20067043 .

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Some Rocks in Early Chinese Painting

James Cahill

Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Two recent photographing projects have facilitated the study of Chinese painting by making available in good photographs many of the masterpieces in the Palace Museum Collection in Formosa.1 Where once even those fortunate enough to have seen parts

of the collection had later to fill out dim memory images with old reproductions that were sometimes scarcely more distinct, the paintings can now be studied at leisure and in de tail. We are no longer limited to conclusions based on compositions alone, but can give the close attention to smaller elements that will often alter or contradict such conclusions.

The present paper is based on a series of de

tails from these photographs, and aims at dis

tinguishing some trends in the depiction of rocks

from the late T'ang through the Northern Sung period. It excludes from consideration, except for occasional remarks, such matters as the com

position of the pictures, the geological nature

and structure of the rocks, stylistic traditions

in the orthodox Chinese sense, local schools?

even, in some cases, the precise dating and

chronological order of the paintings. It goes without saying that all these are important, and that their absence reduces the scope and

value of this inquiry?which, however, is not in

tended to answer any major questions about

early landscape painting, but only to suggest, by

example, the kind of criteria that can be used in

formulating the answers. As for the reliability of the material: only the last four of the twelve

paintings to be considered are signed; for the

rest, we must rely either on old attributions (as most authorities are willing to do, for example,

in the case of the Chao Kan scroll) or on style. At least two of the paintings, the first two to be

discussed, are probably copies of earlier works, and so to be used with caution. Nevertheless, the

writer believes that the paintings are all, with

the exception of the two just mentioned, and

perhaps another, the problematic work ascribed to Kuan Tung, original productions of the

period in question, and that the relationships between styles to be seen in them can be taken

with some assurance as clues to the main trends

and innovations of the period.

Among the twelve paintings that will occupy our attention, the anonymous Emperor Ming

huang's Journey to Shu is the inevitable choice for a starting point; whatever date one may

assign to its actual execution (those who assume

it to be a copy, as I do, have proposed dates for

the copying from the eleventh to the sixteenth

century), it makes no sense when taken as post

dating stylistically any of the others (Fig. 1). Despite the minimal indications of convexity in

the shading from heavy blue-green color to

yellow-orange on the rocks, and the occasional

drawing of a flat-topped rock 30 as to imply two surfaces roughly perpendicular to each

other, the basic mode of construction is in flat,

overlapping faces, like superimposed cardboard

cut-outs, all clearly demarcated with firm line

of even breadth. The only departures from this evenness of line are at the ends?flattened "nail

head" beginnings, tapered "rat-tail" endings. Where the rocks overhang, the result of fractur

ing of strata is depicted in angular undercutting, with repeated right-angled forms arranged in

inverted step patterns. Elsewhere, the longer contours move in sluggish undulation. Short,

fine, faint parallel strokes cover some of the

broader surfaces as a simple kind of texture

stroke (ts'un). These are held by Mr. Li Lin-ts'an to be anachronistic in a late T'ang

composition and to indicate for the copy a date

not earlier than Northern Sung period,2 but

since they seem far more primitive than any other form of texture-stroke known from ex

tant paintings, one need not follow him in that

77



Anonymous copy of Vang dynasty composition? "The Emperor Ming-huang's Journey to Shu,f

(detail). National Central Museum, Taie hung.

Fig. 2. Anonymous copy of T(ang dynasty composition? "The Emperor Ming-huang's Journey to Shu"

(detail). National Central Museum, Taichung.

Fig 3. Anonymous copy of Tang dynasty composition? "Immortals1 Dwellings on Pine-hunv CUHs" ?j

Dwellings on Fine-hung Cliffs*' (detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.

Fig. 4. Anonymous copy of Tfang dynasty composition? "Immortals' Dwellings on Pine-hung Cliffs'* (detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.



conclusion. In any event, they are actually no

more effective in characterizing the surfaces of

the rocks than are the gradations of color in

giving them solidity. The rocks seem scarcely more corporeal than the hard-edged clouds, from which they are distinguished only by color and shape (Fig. 2). The intricate linear patterns and rich color that give this painting its extra

ordinary decorative beauty also confine it to the

surface, fragmenting and flattening the rock

masses, denying them any existence as coherent

volumes.

Until recently this famous landscape was the

only known representative of the distinctive manner of drawing rocks seen in it. But in 1959

there was discovered in the Palace Museum Col

lection another early and important painting in which an almost identical manner is used

(Fig. 3 ). This painting, titled Immortals9 Dwell

ings on Pine-hung Cliffs, is ascribed to an un

known master of the Sung dynasty, and appears to be a copy, executed in that period, of one of

the monumental river landscapes of the type

evidently popular during the late T'ang dynasty and the Five Dynasties period. In composition it

seems more advanced than the Ming-huang pic ture, and if one supposes the original of that

picture to be late eighth or early ninth century in date (a widely held and reasonable view), the

original composition of the Immortals' Dwell

ings might be placed around the later ninth century, still well before the great Five Dynasties revolution in landscape painting.3 What con

cerns us now, however, and what we can say with certainty, is that the rocks in the two

paintings belong to a single stylistic tradition, which was probably older than the original of

either picture, and presumably had some major

landscapist (Li Ssu-hsiin? Li Chao-tao?) at its source. The same lineament appears in both, even

to the "nail-heads" and "rat-tails"; the same

stepped patterns, and contours ranging from

the tight and crotchety to more slow-moving,

wavering line; the same shaded colors, although less brilliant here. But the hair-thin "texture

strokes" of the Ming-huang painting are not to

be seen in the other. Instead, broader strokes in

pale ink have been brushed outward from the interior lines that bound the overlapping faces

of rock, giving them some separation in depth

by suggesting shadows (Fig. 4). In other places, the strokes of ink wash function as a simple kind

of modelling. Spaced fairly evenly in an alterna

tion of light and dark, they portray unmistak

ably a rippling, or "washboard," surface. The

flatness of the rock faces has begun to be re

lieved, if only slightly.

Since both pictures are copies of uncertain

fidelity to lost originals, we cannot give chrono

logical precedence to either system of treating surfaces, but can only recognize in them a basic

technical distinction in early rock painting, be tween the application of many small, separate

strokes, to suggest texture, on the one hand, and

of broader strokes, sometimes graded washes, to

model form, on the other. The development of

both systems is understandably bound up with

the growth of the ink monochrome technique. We can observe this in the fact that rocks are

depicted in ink monochrome in a number of

early paintings otherwise executed in the old

mode of line and color. One such picture is the

River Journey at First Snowfall scroll with an

attribution, which seems acceptable, to the Five

Dynasties master Chao Kan. There are no proper rocks in it, but the treatment of banks and

hillocks of earth gives us some understanding of

the ink monochrome technique of this period. One such hillock, near the beginning of the

scroll, shows an especially accomplished use of

broad, shaded strokes of wash for truly plastic

shaping of a mass, which is conceived with a true

sense of volume, and as a coherent whole

(Fig. 5). In place of interior lineament, the

edges of the wash strokes mark the junctures of

the separate faces?not of flat planes, however, but of freely modeled areas, concave or convex.

This remarkable but isolated passage suggests,

along with some hints in litarary references to

Five Dynasties painting, the immense advances

in three-dimensional rendering that must have

been made during this formative period in the

development of ink-monochrome, based on the new realization of the potentialities of graded wash, and making available a new repertory of

forms that must have seemed, in the excitement

of their discovery, almost tangible. The garden stone in the Eight Riders in Spring, attributed less firmly to another Five Dynasties artists,

Chao Yen, agrees with the Chao Kan hillock in the softness of outline, skillful use of graded ink

wash, and plasticity of form (Fig. 6). The dark

pits and passages through the rock, while they are properly to be accounted for in representa tional terms (this being one of those water

79



Fig. 5. At t. Chao Kan: "A River Journey at First Snow

fall" (detail, enlarged). National Palace Mu seum, Taichung.

Fig. 6. Att. Chao Yen: "Eight Riders in Spring' (detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.

eroded stones transported from lakes, especially the Tcai-hu in Kiangsu Province, to be set up as

ornaments in gardens), are in harmony with

the three-dimensional conception, asserting the

depth of the form by piercing through it?a device well known in some modern Western

sculpture. The bodiless boulders of the Emperor Ming-buang's Journey to Shu could have sus

tained no such treatment; piercing them would

have been like punching holes in paper. Distinc tive in the modeling of the Chao Yen rock are the rounded lumps, fairly uniform in size, which are ranged along the outer edges. The outline,

made up chiefly of successions of arcs, conforms to this interior formation, which may be seen

as a freer and more effective use of what is es

sentially the same simple alternation of light and

dark to render evenly-spaced convexities that we

noted in the Immortals9 Dwellings (Fig. 3).

Such scattered clues are virtually all that re

main to testify to what must have been one of

the preoccupations of the tenth century masters:

the shaping of a mass, and the modeling of its

surface, by ink washes of varying tone. One may wonder what part was played in this develop ment by Ching Hao and Kuan T'ung, probably

the most influential and certainly the most

enigmatic landscapists of that era. Unfortunate

ly, most of the paintings attributed to these two

betray so consistently the styles of later periods that one hesitates to make use of them as evi

dence for the stage of landscape they supposedly represent. An exception is the Travelers in a

Mountain Pass ascribed to Kuan T'ung, which is

very possibly a copy or imitation of a work by Kuan T'ung or a close follower, preserving im

portant features of the original while introduc

ing others, more advanced, that reflect the

period of actual execution (Fig. 7). The diffi

culty of distinguishing between these "layers" of style complicates any conclusions we might draw from the painting. Do the fluctuating,

partly broken contours belong to a later age, when highly calligraphic brushwork is more a matter of course, or are they survivals of an early appearance of such brushwork which is scarcely reflected elsewhere in extant paintings? The

marked swelling and thinning of contour lines in landscapes by or attributed to Yen Wen-kuei

(Fig. 11) suggests that the latter explanation cannot be ruled out. Leaving aside this question and others raised by the painting, we will be content with noting that apart from these oddly



conspicuous contours, and the addition of pale texture strokes to the wash, the huge, top-heavy

mountain that crowns the composition is not un

like the garden rock in the Chao Yen picture: in outline, in the rotundity brought out by

gradation of tone, in the lumpiness along the

edges (see especially the right edge of the "Kuan

T'ung" mountain). And we may be justified in

suspecting that these same forms, or at least the

formal concerns that inspired them, were com

mon as well to a good part of Five Dynasties

painting. Might the "hemp-fiber ts'un" of Tung Yuan and Chii-jan have been a means of em

phasing such rounded shapes by following the convexities of hills and rocks, besides giving them some texture? And were the "alum-stones"

(fan-trou) used by those two artists on summits

and ridges expressions of the same taste, and

applications of the same method, as the lumpy

edges of the Chao Yen rock and the "Kuan

T'ung" mountaintop?

A constant phenomenon in Chinese painting is the degeneration of any mode into a harder,

mannered form fairly soon after its peak of pop

ularity is passed?a negative aspect of tradition

alism, and one to be distinguished from creative uses of old motifs and evocative allusions to old

styles. Examples of the mannerist phase of a style can nonetheless be valuable in emphasizing what

the Chinese considered to be the most prominent features of that style. The curious rock in the

anonymous Monkeys and Horses (attributed,

quite unconvincingly, to the eighth century Han

Kan) is best explained as such a hardened and

exaggerated outgrowth of the mode of rock de

piction we have been trying to define (Fig. 8). The contour, composed of the distinctive series

of convex or concave arcs (in the latter case

producing regularly-spaced protrusions where

these join), is fluctuating and broken, although not so markedly so as in the "Kuan T'ung"

painting. There are no texture strokes, but only

graded washes and broad, wet modeling strokes.

Small, variously shaped pits and apertures break

the surface. The uniformly rounded protuber ances appear in rows, like peas in a pod, or

strange carbuncle growths. The structure of the

rock, with survivals of the old mode of over

lapping planes somewhat at odds with the plastic treatment of surface, is too complex to be easily

characterized, and far too highly evolved to have

been the creation of the painter of this picture.

f?f*

Fig. 7. Att. Kuan Vung: "Travelers in a Mountain Pass" (detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.

Fig. 8. Anonymous, 10th century (att. Han Kan): "Monkeys and Horses" (detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.

81



Fig. 9. Anonymous, early Sung? "Monkeys in a Loquat Tree" (detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.

We may note in passing that the same preoccu

pation with illusionistic rendering of solid form is apparent in the trunk of the nearest tree, shaded inward from the edges for an effect of

simple cylindricality, with curved modeling strokes added to emphasize the shape. Debased

versions of this treatment appear in paintings attributed to Huang Ch'?an and other Five

Dynasties masters; something of the sort evi

dently underlies tree branches in paintings by Ch'ien Hs?an. But this is another theme, for

another study.

Fig. 10. Anonymous, Five Dynasties or Liao dynasty: "Deer in an Au tumn Forest." National Palace Museum, Taichung.

In the lower corner of a better known paint

ing of a similar subject, the anonymous Monkeys in a Loquat Tree, is a rock in which some of our

familiar features reappear (Fig. 9) : rounded

bumps along the edges, modeling with graded washes, holes in the surface (limited now to two

small ones, like worm-holes in wood). This is a

simpler, compact stone, not so tortured in form as the other; less prominent in the picture, it is

less individualized. Most significant is the addi tion of rudimentary ts'un: short,straight texture

strokes, drawn loosely in different directions,

resembling at some points a freely applied cross

hatching. They overcome the unnatural smooth ness of rocks treated with wash only, and yet do not convey anything very specific of the appear ance of real rocks.

The same is true of the small stones seen in one

of the famous pair of paintings of Deer in an

Autumn Forest, generally considered to be tenth

century works (Fig. 10). These are painted in

ink monochrome, like the deer themselves, and in contrast to the rich color of the trees and

bushes. A simple shading establishes their basic

forms, and fine linear texture strokes are applied over this. Here, however, the strokes all have a definite direction, following generally the rounded shapes of the stones.

With these, we are much closer to the fully

developed tsrun-fa (texture-stroke method) of

Northern Sung landscape than with any of the

previous pictures; and if the standard dating of this painting is correct, it provides an effective answer to the argument that this method of

treating rocks originated in the eleventh cen

tury, and that all landscapes in which it is em

ployed must be dated to that or a later century.

By the early Sung period, in fact, the choice be tween the two fundamental modes?rocks or

mountains given rotundity, in one case, by

graded washes, and given texture, on the other,

by the treatment of surface in many small

strokes?was an important factor in the distinc

tion of personal and local styles. Greatest among adherents to the former mode, one may surmise,

was Li Ch'eng; copies and imitations of his work

suggest that the "rocks like clouds" associated

with his follower Kuo Hsi had their source in works of the older master. Two leading ex

ponents of the texture-stroke method can be

identified more positively, since reliable signed works by both are to be found in the Palace

82



?^M?Mu

?*>%i:

v.?

W 4P.-'

F/?. i/. Yen Wen-kuei: "Buildings on a Mountainside" (detail). Na tional Palace Museum, Taichung. From: "Three Hundred

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting in the Palace Museum Col lection."

~ *??isv*ir mm****"*? &x**rfMrMp?

'4. sr.;

mm?:

Fig. 12. Fan K'uan: "Traveling Among Streams and Mountains"

(detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.

Fig. 13. Fan Kruan: "Traveling Among Streams and Mountains" (detail). National Palace Museum,

Taichung.

??:*?? % ?V

y* t% H

Fig. 14. Fan K!uan: "Traveling Among Streams and Mountains" (detail). National Palace Museum,

Taichung.

83



Museum Collection. They are Yen Wen-kuei and

Fan K'uan, both active in the late tenth and

early eleventh centuries.

The whole character of Yen Wen-kuei's land

scape is determined by the painter's paramount aim: to give to the mountains an impression of

towering height (Fig. 11). The shading of masses, accomplished chiefly by varying the

density of the texture strokes, is handled without

regard either for naturalistic lighting (to which the prevailing impression in the picture of light ing from below is, in fact, directly contrary) or for any real sense of volume. The bases of the

many escarpments that dominate the composi tion are uniformly light, as if hidden in mist,

while the crests are darkened for dramatic

emphasis, to serve as momentary resting places for the eye on its ever-upward progress from

peak to peak. This same powerful upward pull works on the texture strokes (a variety of the

"raindrop" tsrun associated more commonly with Fan K'uan) like a magnet upon iron filings, giving them a uniformly vertical direction that

speeds the rising movement. Otherwise, the tex

ture strokes enrich the surfaces, but without

providing more than the barest suggestion of

convexity; the outline of the forms, not their

plastic shape or volume, remains their most signi ficant aspect in this picture. The wavering lines

used for many contours serve not so much to

suggest lumpiness (as in the earlier rocks we

have seen) as to add interest to the silhouette.

Yen Wen-kuei has gained, through a more ex

tensive and systematic use of texture strokes, a

new surface richness, but at the cost of a loss of

substance in the individual forms.

Fan Keuan, in his Traveling Among Moun tains and Streams, painted around the same time or a bit later, sets out to combine the two sys tems of surface treatment so as to reap the bene

fits of both. The texture strokes are again ap

plied as a kind of stippling, varying in density like a graded wash, the sparse areas serving as

highlights and the denser as shadows on the rock forms. However, while the direction of the tsrun

is generally vertical on the great cliff in the

upper part of the picture, as it is throughout the

Yen Wen-kuei landscape, the strokes on the

rocks below tend to take their direction from that of the surface they cover, and are deflected as the surface curves. The device is effective; the

huge foreground boulders are convincingly

rotund (Fig. 12). The dark pits in their lower sides belong , as we have seen, with the tradition

of rendering a convex surface in graded wash,

appearing consistently on rocks treated in that

manner, and so support the assumption that Fan

K*uan was drawing upon that tradition even

while elaborating on the texture-stroke method.

Fan K'uan's system, however, is not a final

solution to the problem of volume vs. texture, for it has one serious drawback. Well suited

to rendering the uninterrupted surfaces of

rounded rocks, it is quite unsuited to more com

plex, angular forms. When the artist turns to

these he finds jio way to use his method of

modeling by graded tone on their smaller sur

face areas (Fig. 13 ). Instead, he draws them with

repeated angular strokes, repeating essentially the archaic manner of the Journey to Shu pic ture (Fig. 1), and covers them fairly evenly

with his dabs of dilute ink, thereby depriving them of body almost as completely as had the

T'ang master with his flat washes of color. Fan

K'uan's vacillation in the face of this dilemma

is revealed clearly in his compromising treat

ment of a boulder in the lower left (Fig. 14) :

beginning with a smooth, bulging forward sur

face, graded with tsrun, he reverts immediately to the system of angular, overlapping planes for

the remainder. Full-bodied rocks of unnatural

roundness and flowing, unbroken surface, or

rocks of a satisfying complexity and angularity of shape but lacking in volume: such, it would appear, was the choice now.

The next great landscapist whose work sur

vives, Kuo Hsi, makes his choice unequivocally, in favor of the coherent, generally smooth-sur

faced mass (Fig. 15, 16). His rounded rocks?

if one can use that term loosely for what are

actually eroded loess deposits?with their lumpy tops and pitted undersides (the pits indicated, as

usual, by irregular patches of deep-toned ink) seem survivals of the tradition we have traced

from the tenth century, and so slightly old

fashioned in the midst of Kuo Hsi's quasi-im

provisatory creation. They are not modeled with

the old graded washes, however, but with an

overlaying of broad, wet strokes, not individual

ly distinct enough to function as texture strokes, but having a direction that helps in establishing the form, and a range of tone that permits subtle

suggestions of slight localized irregularities of surface. The technique falls, like the surface

84



treatment in the "Kuan Tung" picture, be tween proper graded wash and Fan K'uan's

system of modeling through uneven application of tsrun, the Kuo Hsi being closer to the former, the "Kuan Tung" (Fig. 7) to the latter.

What is new in Kuo Hsi's portrayal of rocks

is the technique of defining a form by rendering the fall of light on that form. Even though the statement in his treatise on landscape about the

use of light and shade to give form to a moun

tain4 should have prepared us for the practice of

the same device in his paintings, the skill with which the forms in his great Early Spring of

1072 are modeled with light has gone all but un noticed in discussions of that masterwork. Per

haps we are so accustomed to this technique in

Occidental painting that its occasional appear ances in China seem less striking to us than they

must have to the Chinese. The play of light, for

example, on the enormous ovoid mass to the

right of the waterfall (Fig. 15 ), or on the under cut hillock that blocks the entrance to the valley at left (Fig. 16), exceeds in naturalism anything seen before. This is no longer the simple, formal

ized shading inward from contours, or around

small convexities, but the outcome of long ob

servation of actual phenomena of lighting in

nature. The naturalistic intent is confined to

local areas, one must add; contrasts of light and

shadow are exaggerated throughout the picture, and the illumination is by no means consistent

in either source or intensity. On the contrary, the fitful lighting, along with the oddness of the terrain itself, gives the painting a strong and

dramatic sense of unreality in total effect.

All the elements were now present for a final

solution. The artist who accomplished it, and

painted rocks more rocky than any Chinese had

before him, was Li Tang. His most often-noted

innovation in rock portrayal was the "axe-cut

ts'un", a broadening of Fan K'uan's "raindrop" texture strokes into rough sweeps made with the

side of the brush, to produce a surface resem

bling that of a block of wood hewn by an axe. This was no small achievement; it caught, more

accurately than any previous brush manner, the

real look of fractured and weathered stone. Even more original, however, was Li Tang's manner

of depicting a rock with several more or less flat faces visible, and lighting these so as to reveal

their angle to the line of view. Primitive antici

pations of this device can be found as far back

Fig. 15. Kuo Hsi: "Early Spring" (detail). National Palace Museum,

Taichung.

85

Fig. 16. Kuo Hsi: "Early Spring" (detail). National Palace Museum,

Taichung.



as the flat-topped rocks in the Ming-huang pic ture (Fig. 1), and the author of the "Wang

Wei" treatise on landscape had advised that three sides of a rock should be shown;5 but no one

before had shown them so distinctly. The pro jecting mass of rock in the upper center of Li

Tang's Whispering Pines in the Valley, dated 1124, best exemplifies his new method (Fig. 17), especially when it is seen beside the boulders painted by Fan K'uan a century or so earlier

(Fig. 12, 13). Angularity is the very theme of Fan K'uan's brush drawing, emphasized in every bent stroke; yet his forms remain essentially

spheroid masses to which angular protuberances have been added. The many small areas set off by linear divisions do not appear as facets, set at

angles to each other, but rather as if seen

straight-on, all parallel to the picture plane. The uniform texturing strengthens that impression. Li Tang's rock, by contrast, is conceived as a

volume enclosed by flat sides intersecting at

Fig. 17. Li Tang: "Whispering Pines in the Valley" (detail). National Palace Museum, Taichung.

clearly understood angles. Interior lineament

marks these junctures, not fissures or edges of

overlapping parallel planes, and so serves to

clarify the three-dimensional structure instead of

flattening it. Once this structure is established, corners may be rounded off, surfaces broken and

roughened by "axe-cut" strokes, without ob

scuring the basic form. Two devices are used in

fixing the positions and relationships of the sides:

foreshortening of those that slope sharply away from the viewer, and variation in tone to dis

tinguish those turned toward a light source from

those turned away. The effectiveness of both

may be seen in the treatment of the upper right surface as a series of narrow streaks of light,

perfectly distinct from the darker, broader sur

face that slopes down to the left. The rock

stands, bulky and imposing, geologically intelli gible, exhibiting both solidity and a natural sur face. The reconciliation of these last two quali ties is so complete that one must look back over

our earlier examples to recall that they had ever

seemed incompatible.

It was a triumphant solution, and one that

deserved to be more influential than in fact it was.6 Typical Southern Sung landscape, in the

century and a half that followed, held no suitable setting for rough and rugged boulders; three dimensional rendering of form was of ever de

creasing concern to painters; stony surfaces dis

appear along with realistic textures generally. Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei broaden and relax the

"small axe-cut" texture strokes into the "large axe-cut," making them in the end more calli

graphic than descriptive; and while they often

shape their rocks with dramatic contrasts of

light and shade, they usually do with less of

systematic seriousness and representational intent

than had their master, Li Tang. Their rocks, beside his, seem sleek and sophisticated, as if

symbols of a younger generation, for whom

things come easier, spending lightly a hard-won

legacy.

86



NOTES

1. In the autumn of 1959, Mr. Henry Beville, Photographer for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C, accom

panied the author to Taichung to make color transparencies for the book Chinese Painting (published the following year

by Albert Skira, Geneva). Black and white negatives in the

8" x 10" size were made from the paintings at the same time.

Through the kind permission of the Joint Committee for

National Palace and Central Museums, twenty-five additional black and white photographs were taken for study purposes. In May, 1961, the paintings in the exhibition of Chinese Art

Treasures from the same collection were photographed at the

National Gallery prior to the opening of the exhibition by Mr. Raymond Schwartz, Photographer for the Freer Gallery of Art. The negatives from both projects are kept in the Freer

Gallery, and contact prints are available from the Gallery for the purpose of study, or, if express permission is obtained from the Joint Committee in Formosa, for publication. A third photographing project, carried out by Japanese photog raphers in 1958, covered more paintings than either of these, and led to the publication of the invaluable Three Hundred

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting in the Palace Museum

Collection, Taichung, National Palace and Central Museum,

1959, 6 vols., but no prints from negatives made at that time are generally available.

2. Li Lin-ts'an, "A Study of the Masterpiece 'Tang Ming-huang's

Journey to Shu'," Ars Orientalis IV, 1961, pp. 315-321,

especially p. 318.

3. Li Lin-ts'an, "Sung-jen Sung-yen hsien-kuan t'u" (The

Anonymous Sung "Immortals' Dwellings on Pine-hung Cliffs"

Painting), Ta-lu tsa-chih, vol. 22 no. 2, January, 1961, pp. 38-40. Mr. Li believes that the painting may be a Northern

Sung copy of a composition by the eighth century master Lu

Hung.

4. "The parts of a mountain struck by the sunlight are bright; those not reached by the sun are dark. Mountains depend, for

their constant forms, upon sunlight and shade. If light and

dark are not differentiated, there is no (effect of) sunlight and shade." {Hua hs?n, in Wang-shih hua-yuan pu-i, pp.

18b-19a.)

5. "Wang Wei," Shan-shui ch?eh, in Wang-shih hua-y?an pu-i\ cf. Shio Sakanishi, The Spirit of the Brush, p. 71, for translation.

6. For other examples of rocks painted in this manner, by followers of Li Tang, see: the two landscapes in the Kotoin,

Daitokuji, Kyoto, one of which bears an effaced Li Tang

signature (Siren, Chinese Painting, Leading Masters and

Principles, vol. II, pi. 249 and 250); the signed landscape

by Li's direct pupil Hsiao Chao, in the Palace Museum

{Three Hundred Masterpieces, vol. Ill, pi. 103); and a

landscape in the Freer Gallery of Art, which reportedly once had a signature of Hsia Kuei, and might be an early

work of his (Siren, Chinese Paintings in American Collec

tions, Part IV, pi. 137; and Bachofer, A Short History of Chinese Art, pi. 109). See especially the foreground rocks in

all cases.

Note: Complete reproductions of all but two of the paintings from which details are reproduced with this paper may be found in Three Hundred Masterpieces of Chinese Painting (see footnote I), as follows:

Fig. 1, 2: Vol. I, pi. 35.

Fig. 5: Vol. II, pi. 50.


Fig. 7: Vol. I, pi. 39.

Fig. 9: Vol. Ill, pi. 138.



Fig. 12-14: Vol. II, pi. 64.

Fig. 15, 16: Vol. II, pi. 76.

Fig. 17: Vol. Ill, pi. 95.

The painting from which Fig. 3 and 4 are taken is reproduced with Mr. Li Lin-ts'an's article mentioned in Footnote 2 (on the cover of that issue of Ta-lu tsa-chih ) ; the painting from

which Fig. 8 is taken is reproduced in color in James Cahill, Chinese Painting, Geneva, Skira, 1960, p. 71.

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some rocks in early chinese painting

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