Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China 9780520945678, 9780520258570

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
One Recognizing Vernacular Painting
Two Studio Artists in Cities and Court
Three Adoptions from the West
Four The Artists’ Repertories
Five Beautiful Women and the Courtesan Culture
Conclusion
Appendix: Poem by Zhou Qi
Glossary
List of Chinese Names and Terms
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

   has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

.

   

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation. The publisher also acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by Howard and Mary Ann Rogers and the Tang Research Foundation.

Pictures for Use and Pleasure

James Cahill

Pictures for Use and Pleasure Vernacular Painting in High Qing China

universit y of california press berkeley los angeles london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California The frontispiece is a detail of Anonymous, A Family Celebrating New Year’s (figure 4.5), London Gallery, Tokyo. Details from the following works appear as chapter openers: (1) Zhang Zhen, Lady at Window, with Two Cats (figure 2.6), private collection; (2) Anonymous, The Yongzheng Emperor Enjoying Pleasures (figure 2.8), Palace Museum, Beijing; (3) Cui Hui, Imaginary Portrait of Li Qingzhao (figure 3.20), Palace Museum, Beijing; (4) Anonymous, Group Portrait: A Family outside Their House (figure 4.17), The British Museum, London, © The Trustees of The British Museum; (5) Anonymous, follower of Leng Mei, Woman Resting from Reading (figure 5.13), The British Museum, London, Wegener Collection, © The Trustees of The British Museum.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Cahill, James, 1926–   Pictures for use and pleasure : vernacular painting in high Qing China / James Cahill.     p. cm. — (Recognizing vernacular painting — Studio artists in cities and court — Adoptions from the West — The artists’ repertories — Beautiful women and the courtesan culture — Conclusion — Appendix. Poem by Zhou Qi — Glossary — List of Chinese names and terms.)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-25857-0 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  Genre painting, Chinese—Ming-Qing dynasties, 1368–1912.  2.  Art and society—China— History.  I.  Title.  II.  Title: Vernacular painting in high Qing China.   nd1452.c6c34  2010   759.951'09032—dc22 2009047758 Manufactured in China 19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of a nsi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

contents

Preface and Acknowledgments   vii

on e



t wo



thr e e



fou r



fi v e





Recognizing Vernacular Painting   1 Studio Artists in Cities and Court   31 Adoptions from the West   67 The Artists’ Repertories   99 Beautiful Women and the Courtesan Culture   149 Conclusion   199

Appendix: Poem by Zhou Qi   203 Glossary   205 List of Chinese Names and Terms   209 Notes   215 Bibliography   239 List of Illustrations   253 Index   259

preface and acknowledgments

The theme of this book and the materials it treats are mostly new to scholarship, and were art-historically impenetrable until the paintings could be assembled and considered together. That task has required years of looking through odd corners of museums, poring over old reproduction books and auction catalogs, and gathering slides and photographs. For the benefit of future researchers who may want to follow up on particular subjects and types discussed here, I have provided many references in notes to paintings of the same kinds as those reproduced. Most readers can ignore such references. Since the book is intended to chart initially an expansive subject area—long essays or even books could be devoted to topics and issues I touch on only lightly—I hope it will inspire a great many writings, from term papers to advanced scholarly disquisitions, and want to provide whatever assistance I can to those who undertake them. The pictures reproduced here are only a sampling, then, from a much larger number that could have been used to represent particular types. A great mine of unpublished and more or less unexamined painting remains in collections in the People’s Republic of China, from which, with few exceptions, only reliable works by name artists have been selected for reproduction, at least for the later periods. The thousands of paintings reproduced in the 24-volume series Zhongguo Lidai Shuhua Tumu (referred to herein simply as Tumu—see the list of abbreviations at the beginning of the bibliography)—by far the largest compilation of paintings from collections in the People’s Republic of China, were chosen, for instance, by an

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“­ authentication committee,” which means that the contents are generally limited to what the committee judged to be genuine works by name artists. Paintings of the kinds treated in this book, many of them bearing false signatures or misleading attributions to famous masters of earlier periods, are likely to have been among those rejected and so remain unpublished. Many more are in collections in other places around the world, little noticed because of their “low-class” and “nongenuine” status. I will be grateful to private owners, curators, and others who bring good examples to my attention (e-mail: [email protected]). Because the writing of this book has drawn me into areas of Chinese studies where (to understate the matter) I was not entirely at home, I have called on colleagues for help and advice, and am very grateful for their responses; none of them is at fault, needless to say, if I still founder or lose my way in their fields of expertise. Prominent specialists in Chinese women’s studies who have advised me include Susan Mann, Dorothy Ko, Ellen Widmer, Victoria Cass, Charlotte Furth, and Kathryn Lowry. Others to whom I am indebted for assistance of many kinds include Helmut Brinker, Anne Burkus-Chasson, Sarah Handler, Marsha Haufler, Jonathan Hay, Robert Hegel, Zaixin Hong, Harold Kahn, Mayching Kao, Hiromitsu Kobayashi, Hironobu Kohara, Ellen Laing, Thomas Lawton, Charles Mason, Keith McMahon, Robert Mowry, Alfreda Murck, Susan Naquin, J. P. Park, Paul Moss, Evelyn Rawski, David Roy, Jerome Silbergeld, Jan Stuart, Hsingyuan Tsao, Richard Vinograd, Clarissa von Spee, Roderick Whitfield, Laura Whitman, Wu Hung, Yang Xin, Daniel Youd, and Judith Zeitlin. I also wish to thank the curatorial staffs of both the Palace Museum in Beijing, especially Yu Hui, Shan Guoqiang, and Nie Chongzheng, and the National Palace Museum in Taipei, as well as those of the Shanghai Museum, especially Shan Guolin; the British Museum, especially (at that time) Anne Farrer, later Jan Stuart; the Chicago Art Institute, especially (at that time) Stephen Little, later Elinor Pearlstein; the Metropolitan Museum, especially Judith Smith and Maxwell Hearn; the Princeton University Art Museum, especially Cary Liu; the East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley, especially Deborah Rudolph; and the University Art Museum, later the Berkeley Art Museum, especially Lisa Calden, Sheila Keppel, and Julia White. Howard Rogers contributed greatly to this book, being always responsive to my requests for help, sharing information from his extensive files. John Finlay contributed his time and scholarly expertise, especially in problems concerning the Manchu court and its pictorial productions. Andrea Goldman, while she was still a graduate student, provided a great deal of high-level assistance and advice, far exceeding what one could properly expect of a research assistant. Naomi Richard, who edited the text at an earlier stage, stands alone as every Chinese-studies scholar’s dream of an editor: tirelessly understanding but firm-minded, wry and sharp in her commentary, able to penetrate mysteriously to what one meant to write but didn’t. Jim Peck, for whose grand-scale publication project The Culture and Civi­ lization of China this book was originally written, was supportive and helpful in many ways during its early formation.

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In that earlier form, as intended for Peck’s project, the book was essentially completed by late 2002 and was ready to go into production when the project was scuttled, mainly by the incoming director of a university press. The same press kept my book on for separate consideration but finally rejected it, on the basis of lukewarm reports by (I believe) badly chosen reviewers. It was rescued by Deborah Kirshman, assistant director of University of California Press, who has my deep gratitude. Stephanie Fay, as the book’s editor for UC Press, has guided me expertly through its necessary transformation into a more readable and better-organized work. I am very grateful to her, and to Eric Schmidt of UC Press, who has been responsible for many aspects of its production. My two older children, Nicholas and Sarah Cahill, have given me much-needed support over my recent period of physical infirmity and personal difficulties, as have, in their different way, my younger boys Julian and Benedict. I am grateful also for their support to Hu Shou-fang and Randy Moore, and to a worldwide network of old friends and colleagues, with my former students prominent among them. The book is dedicated to all of them.

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one

Recognizing Vernacular Painting So much has been written over the centuries about Chinese painting—by the Chinese themselves, and over the past century by Japanese, Western, and other foreign authors as well—that the chance of any large and important area of it remaining unstudied might seem small. But the subject of this book, Chinese painting of the kind I call vernacular, is just such an unexplored area. It has been a focus of my own attention only relatively recently, late in a long career, and I arrived at it by a strange, roundabout route. As a graduate student in the 1950s writing my doctoral dissertation about the artist Wu Zhen (1280–1354), I realized that a key to understanding his thought and his works lay in defining the ideas about expression in painting that had come to dominate the thinking and practice of the most prestigious artists of his time. This was the theory of literati painting, which had arisen in the eleventh century among a group of scholar-artist-critics associated with the great poet and statesman Su Shi, or Su Dongpo (1036–1101). It held that paintings by amateur artists, men of the scholar-official class who were learned in the classics and expected to devote themselves mainly to scholarship and government service, were by their very authorship superior to works by the technically trained professional painters. By the fourteenth century, the time of Wu Zhen’s activity, this way of thinking about

­ ainting was so widely accepted as to endanger the critical reception of other kinds p of work, especially those by openly professional masters, many of whom continued in the “academic” styles practiced in the Imperial Painting Academy of the fallen Song Dynasty. I devoted half of my dissertation to a first attempt at formulating a coherent theory of literati painting; later I published an article incorporating some of my findings under the title “Confucian Elements in the Theory of Painting” and wrote about the literati-professional distinction on a more popular level in my book Chinese Painting.1 I was sometimes accused, not undeservedly, of setting myself up as a spokesman for these critical ideas and attitudes, a true believer. In the half-century since then, much has changed in my thinking. One fundamental truth I realized early on, though it was only later that I understood its full implications, is that the great corpus of Chinese painting theory and criticism as it has been preserved, richer and fuller by far than the literature of any other of the world’s premodern artistic traditions, is heavily biased in favor of the literati artists and their works—understandably so, since the authors of it were virtually all members of the literati class themselves, and so strongly inclined to favor the kinds of painting practiced and promoted by their fellows. A slower realization was that Chinese painting as it survives today has been, in effect, severely censored by this same elite, the Chinese male educated class, who have exercised control over its transmission, deciding which paintings should be preserved, remounted and repaired when they needed to be, and passed down through collections, and which others deserved to be neglected and lost. A good part of my later career has been devoted to attempts to recover and reconstitute, insofar as possible, “lost” areas of Chinese painting by identifying and bringing together pieces that have somehow survived, against the odds. A closely related interest in recent years, and another that has led me away from orthodox Chinese attitudes about painting, has been the pursuit and study of pictures of women. This began with a mistake made in an exhibition that I organized with a graduate seminar and held at our University Art Museum in Berkeley in 1971. The exhibition was The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period; the mistake was including in the show and its catalog a very beautiful painting of a seated woman that proved, after further consideration and research, to have been falsely dated and misidentified in an interpolated inscription with a spurious signature.2 In short, to make it more respectable and salable, a generic meiren hua or “beautiful-woman painting”—a picture, that is, of a beauty as a type, not of any individual person—had been fitted out with an impossibly early date and a spurious identification as a portrait of a famous woman. My concern with righting this mistake expanded into a deep curiosity about paintings of women in China: why were they so unstudied and so misunderstood? I complained in a lecture at the time that we “cannot even tell the portraits from the pinups.” Chinese writers on painting, when they mentioned pictures of women at all, referred to them loftily and without differentiation as shinu hua or “paintings of gentlewomen.” And no one had written seriously about them. At this time innovative studies by social historians and others

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of women’s changing role in Chinese society, especially in the Ming-Qing period, were adding rich revelations that were revising our old stereotypes of the stable Confucian society and its pattern of male dominance. Scholars engaged in women’s studies of this kind were making heavy use of Chinese vernacular and popular literature, a field that had also opened up remarkably in recent decades. But no one was looking seriously at the paintings, or taking account of what they could reveal about these new concerns. In the spring of 1994 I delivered a series of Getty lectures titled “The Flower and the Mirror: Representations of Women in Late Chinese Painting.”3 As I began to rework those lectures for publication as a book, I added a section meant to supply a larger context not seriously addressed in the lectures: Who were the artists who did the generic pictures of women, meiren hua and others? What else did they paint? Why were their works so marginalized as low-class? Why have so many of their works been, like the picture in our exhibition, misattributed and misrepresented? The chapter meant to answer those questions grew as the answers unfolded, turning into a separate book—this one. Gradually I came to recognize and attempt to define a great body of painting, created over the centuries by studio artists working in the cities, artists who produced pictures as required for diverse everyday domestic and other uses, pictures I have come to call vernacular. They were intended not so much for pure aesthetic appreciation as for hanging on particular occasions such as New Year’s celebrations and birthdays, or for serving particular functions, such as setting the tone in certain rooms of the house or illustrating a story. These and other uses of them will be explored in the chapters that follow. They were executed in the polished “academic” manner of fine-line drawing and colors, usually on silk, and were valued for their elegant imagery and their lively and often moving depictions of subjects that answered the needs and desires of those who acquired and hung them, or enjoyed them in album and handscroll (horizontal scroll) form. They fell outside the categories of painting praised by critics and preserved by collectors, which were valued, by contrast, as individual creations and personal expressions of prestigious masters; serious painting collecting in China, as in the West, was largely a matter of pursuing genuine works by name artists. Most desirable, especially for the periods after the Song Dynasty ended in the late thirteenth century, were the works of scholar-amateur artists or literati painters, educated men who, endowed with high principles through their study of the Confucian classics, were expected to devote their principal energies to scholarship and public service. In theory they practiced painting only as a leisure pastime and a form of self-cultivation, not for material gain. That this disinterested character of literati painting was largely a myth is a subject I have written about elsewhere.4 Myth or not, it served as a potent barrier to exclude openly professional artists who accepted commissions and produced pictures to satisfy particular needs. Vernacular paintings, then, had several counts against them in the critical system that dominated Chinese connoisseurship and collecting. They were openly

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functional, in a culture that professed to despise functionalism. They were in the wrong styles, executed in ways that did not prominently display the hand of the artist in personalized brushwork. The identity of their makers was ordinarily of small concern to those who acquired and hung them, and in any case the artists were not of the literati class, men who were supposed to manifest their high-culture refinements in their paintings. Moreover, the subjects of vernacular paintings were likely to be drawn more from everyday life and popular culture than from the revered classics and histories. Some of the subjects were mildly or outright erotic, and thus transgressed into an area forbidden to serious writers and painters—in a Ming play, a literati artist asked to paint the heroine’s portrait refuses, saying that “beautiful women are the lowest level of painting in an artist’s repertory.”5 Moreover, since collectors had no interest in vernacular paintings, dealers and other owners commonly furnished them with misleading attributions and interpolated signatures of early and respected masters, intended to give them greater commercial value, if under false colors. Many of them survive, then, as “fakes,” from which the misidentifications must be stripped away before they can be given their true art-historical status and seen for what they are. There was a time, only decades ago, when some of the same factors excluded Chinese vernacular and popular literature from serious appreciation and study. Specialists devoted themselves largely to belletristic writing and poetry, along with philosophical and other texts that reflected the concerns of the literati elite, the educated male minority who dominated Chinese society. Non-elite literature (i.e., writing that was not addressed primarily, or only, at the classically trained male elite), like non-elite painting, was considered too low-class or vulgar to merit critical attention. But in the field of literary studies the taboos were broken, and there has appeared in the past half-century or so a large secondary literature, growing in subtlety of argument, on vernacular fiction, drama, local popular songs, and the like. If scholars of Chinese literature had remained hobbled by the old elitist attitudes, the great advances they have made in recent decades would not have happened, and the new understandings of Chinese social history, concepts of gender and the status of women, and all the other concerns that have been opened for investigation through studies of non-elite literature would have remained closed. The present book is meant to stimulate a similar opening up in Chinese painting studies, where similar rewards await those willing to expand their vision to include the long-scorned vernacular pictorial art. The rewards, as we will see, are considerable. “Respectable” painting in China had long ago narrowed its range of acceptable subjects to rule out, with few exceptions, scenes of daily life, scenes that seem to convey the real feelings of the people portrayed, and scenes that explore human relationships in more than the stiffest and most moralistic ways. A heavy concentration on landscape promoted the virtues of escaping from the human world to live in nature; symbolic plants and birds, auspicious figures, historical scenes that carried political messages all belonged to a largely closed system of interpreting pictorial imagery. The artists who produced

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vernacular paintings—mostly masters of small renown working in studios in the cities—also worked under constraints, the principal one being that they satisfy the needs and desires of their clientele. But because those desires were so diverse and flexible, the urban studio artists enjoyed considerable freedom, and they used it to explore the real world around them far more freely in their works than their prestigious contemporaries could do, revealing subtle insights into Chinese life and the workings of Chinese society. In Japan a century of study, in an atmosphere less dominated by a censorious orthodoxy than in China, has illuminated the once-neglected areas of f u¯ zoku’ga or genre painting and ukiyo’e (pictures of the floating world), both prints and paintings. Our vernacular paintings might be thought of as Chinese rough equivalents to those, as long as we are careful to get the sequence of events right: late-Ming erotic prints imported from China in fact played a large role in the beginnings of ukiyo’e in Japan, and some Chinese vernacular painting was familiar to Edo-period artists, and used by them. Pictures portraying the alluring figures and activities of the courtesan culture of China, and of the corresponding “floating world” of Japan, make up a large part of both painting traditions. Both shade easily into the openly erotic. This book will end with a chapter about courtesan culture and beautifulwoman (meiren) paintings in China, but will stop short of treating the chungong hua (spring palace pictures), Chinese erotic paintings mostly in album form; those will be the subject of a separate, smaller book, tentatively titled Scenes from the Spring Palace: Chinese Erotic Printing and Painting.6 The copious production of studies and reproduction books of Japanese fu¯ zoku’ga and ukiyo’e prompts again the question: why has so little been written about the corresponding kinds of vernacular painting in China? I propose some tentative answers in what follows. But the primary explanation lies in the beliefs and attitudes, based in the dogma of traditional Chinese literati-painting theory, that have dominated our studies. No one states it exactly as I will here, but it nonetheless underlies a great deal of the writing and thinking in our field, both within China and outside. It takes the form of an unchallenged equation, an assumption that certain elements in Chinese painting and its surrounding circumstances always belong together and so take on the character of equivalence. It goes like this (the elements can appear in any order): in later Chinese painting, scholar-amateurism = brushwork = calligraphy = self-expression = disdain for representation = high-mindedness = high quality. Nothing has so hampered independent and innovative directions in Chinese painting studies as the uncritical acceptance of this equation by many of our specialist scholars. It was, until recently, the likely basis of the training of a connoisseur in China; elsewhere, whole academic programs have promulgated it and indoctrinated students with it, as if it were a central truth about Chinese painting. It will not be overturned easily or soon. But books such as this one could not be written until its hold on at least one scholar was broken. At a time when little else of the old, self-serving rhetoric of elites has been allowed to stand, this one has been surprisingly tenacious. I hope this book will further erode it.

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Paintings of the vernacular types had been made from the earliest periods of Chinese painting, but their production greatly increased in volume and variety during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period with which this book is mainly concerned. This is the “high Qing” of the book’s title, comprising the reigns of three emperors of the Qing or Manchu dynasty, Kangxi (r. 1662–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1723–35), and Qianlong (r. 1735–95). In the late Ming period, the later sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth, Chinese society had been profoundly transformed from one that was basically agrarian to one increasingly urban and mercantile. In the new society, a growing urban middle class, affluent and eager to adopt the elegant lifestyle that had formerly been the prerogative of a landed gentry and government officials, provided a vastly expanded market for the works and services of artists, artisans, writers, and entertainers of all kinds. A huge increase in the production of printed books created in the great cities an urban print culture that underlies the heightened sophistication of the artists to be considered here and their clientele. The city of Suzhou, located below the Yangtze River some fifty miles inland from present-day Shanghai, experienced the most extraordinary new growth. The urban studio masters were also active in other cities located, like Suzhou, in the Yangtze delta region, cities such as Wuxi, Nanjing, and Yangzhou. Later, from early in the eighteenth century, a northern branch would grow up in Beijing, somewhat in the shadow of the Imperial Painting Academy there. I touch on regional aspects of vernacular painting at a few points where they seem relevant and ascertainable, but they cannot yet map the geographical development in any detail. Since my purpose is to illuminate long-neglected areas of Chinese painting, I do not treat some genres and types in the repertories of the urban studio artists that have been the subjects of substantial studies by others. These include single-figure portraits and Buddhist-Daoist religious painting.7 Imperial Academy painting— another heavily studied category—will be dealt with only peripherally, in its relation to the production of the urban artists who are our principal focus.8 Court painting, partly because of the glamour associated with the two Palace Museums, Beijing and Taipei, in which most of it is preserved, and partly because it is backed up with copious court records that support research on it, has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both in exhibitions and in scholarly publications. Again, this book is aimed at shifting some of that attention to the more relaxed, ultimately richer body of vernacular painting produced and used in the larger society outside the court. Two Traditions of Painting

A few examples of the two types, literati and vernacular painting, can introduce them and demonstrate how deeply unlike, visually and expressively, they can be. For the most extreme contrast, a handscroll by a prominent scholar-amateur artist can be juxtaposed with one by an anonymous studio master. (I admit to slanting the comparison to favor the latter.) The late Ming literatus Li Rihua (1565–1635) was represented in the excellent 1988 exhibition The Chinese Scholar’s Studio by a

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landscape handscroll he painted in 1625 titled Rivers and Mountains in My Dream (figure 1.1). Li had held a high position in the Ministry of Rites in Beijing, and his paintings, though amateurish (he never really studied painting), were much in demand, partly for their status-symbol value as creations of a man of high official rank. His 1625 scroll was praised in the catalog as a work in which “the landscape serv[es] as a vehicle for the poet-painter to express his desire to rise above the vicissitudes of the mundane world.”9 The other handscroll, an anonymous work, depicts a family New Year’s celebration, with the elders watching from the doorway as the children, seemingly all boys, enact the seasonal festivities as play. It is an example of one of the vernacular types to be represented in this book and dates probably from the early Qing, the later seventeenth century (figure 1.2, whole composition; see also figure 4.3, detail). There is little doubt that Li Rihua’s scroll will have the more immediate appeal for many viewers, including some who are unfamiliar with Chinese painting but find more of visual stimulation, say, in an abstract-expressionist work of the 1950s than in a seventeenth-century Dutch interior. But on longer looking, I believe, Li Rihua’s scroll will reveal itself as a work of much smaller interest and accomplishment, more inept than untrammeled.10 It is a work that might seem to justify the old Chinese contention that “painting and calligraphy are a single art”—but only by

1.1 Li Rihua (1565–1635), Rivers and Mountains in My Dream. Dated 1625. Sections 1 and 2 of a handscroll, ink on paper, 23.4 x 253.3 cm. Shanghai Museum.

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1.2 Anonymous (late Ming or early Qing period), A Family Celebrating New Year’s. Horizontal painting, ink and colors on silk, 94 x 176 cm. Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

demonstrating the artist’s confinement to nondescriptive, “calligraphic” brushstrokes. And it exemplifies an uncomfortable truth about studies of Chinese painting: we regularly praise and publish amateurish, even awkward works in the Chinese critical category of estimable art, or fine art, largely because of their authorship or because they exhibit some received ideas and shibboleths about the characteristics of high art. The New Year’s picture would normally not be praised or exhibited or published in China because it not only fails to “rise above the mundane world,” but also chooses to represent that world in loving detail—a choice that more or less automatically, for a traditional Chinese connoisseur, consigns it to the realm of the trivial.11 Such a connoisseur, noting also that it bears a false attribution to the great Ming master Qiu Ying (ca. 1495–1552), would pronounce it a forgery of the type called Suzhou pian (a dismissive term for the commercial productions of minor artists working in Suzhou in the Ming-Qing period), roll it up quickly, and forget it. But unrolled again and seen for itself, it proves to be a delightful picture, which apart from its artistic merit supplies a lot of detailed information about a New Year’s celebration in a large, well-off family in early Qing China. I will return to the work in chapter 4. Paintings by two artists who were not only contemporaries but also friends, Wang Shimin (1592–1680) and Gu Jianlong (1606–88 or after), offer an equally unlike but more congenial pairing (see figures 1.4 and 1.5, below). Wang Shimin was one of the most respected literati painters of his time, and the oldest of the so-called Four Wangs who were leading masters of the Orthodox school of landscape in the early Qing. He was, moreover, a direct pupil of Dong Qichang (1555–1636), the master

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who was surely the most powerful figure in later Chinese painting, as a landscapist, a critic, and the theorist who formulated the immensely influential doctrine of the Southern and Northern schools of painting. This doctrine (which will be discussed further below) was a quasi-art-historical division of landscape painters into two lineages, the Southern, made up of the literati masters and the artists they claimed as predecessors, and the Northern, to which the professional and academy painters were assigned. Wang was a Southern and Gu a Northern school master within this formulation. Gu Jianlong was an openly professional studio artist, one of the relatively few of that class to attain some prominence, even if only as a painter of secondary rank—he will reappear a number of times in this book as an innovator of certain types within our category of vernacular painting. Both Wang and Gu were natives of Taicang in Jiangsu, another of the Yangtze delta cities; Gu was active as an artist mostly in nearby Suzhou, and spent some of his later years in Beijing as a court painter for the Kangxi emperor. In Suzhou he lived at Tiger Hill, one of the pleasure districts a short distance outside the city, where artists like him, who portrayed beautiful women and other images popular within the courtesan culture, commonly lived, surrounded by both their subjects and the market for their works. Gu also painted erotic albums, a genre within which he was a notable innovator. Today Gu Jianlong is remembered especially in Chinese painting circles as the artist of a surviving forty-six-leaf album of mogu fenben (study sketches after old paintings) that reveals a great deal about his working methods and about traditional studio practice more generally (figure 1.3).12 Few such albums have been preserved, especially outside China. This was only one of many such albums that Gu compiled over the years; Wang Shimin, in a long colophon written for one of them, reported seeing the albums “piled as high as himself.” As opportunities arose for him to see and copy from old pictures, Gu Jianlong added to the albums. He kept them for reference, to supply imagery and pictorial information—costumes and hairdos of early periods, old furniture and architecture, fabric designs, and components of landscape in the styles of various schools—for incorporation into his own pictures as needed. This way of working contrasted sharply with the literati painters’ insistence on spontaneity and on maintaining a consistent, distinct personal style. An example of how Gu Jianlong put the antique imagery from his fenben albums to work can be seen in a painting that probably represents the eighth-century emperor Xuanzong spying on his favorite consort, Yang Guifei, as she bathes (figure 1.4). Although it is unsigned and has been loosely catalogued as “anonymous Ming,” it can be attributed to Gu Jianlong or a close follower on the basis of style. Its overtly erotic content—the near-nudity of Yang Guifei, viewed through a splitbamboo screen, and the prurience of the emperor’s spying on her, a transgression of which she is quite aware, as her sidelong look betrays—suggests that the painting might have hung in the bedroom of a man, or in a courtesan’s chambers. This is a work of high technical finish, with meticulous attention to fine details of architectural ornament and furniture, luxury objects, the attendants’ costumes (suitably antique in appearance though scarcely true to the intended period, the mid-Tang)

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1.3 Gu Jianlong (1606–88 or after), Leaf 45 from an album of 46 leaves, Sketches after the Old Masters (mogu fenben). Ink and colors on paper, 36.8 x 29.2 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; purchase: Nelson Trust (59–24/45). Photograph by Jamison Miller.

with lavish use of gold and heavy pigments that still glow from the darkened silk surface. Wang Shimin, in the long colophon he wrote for one of Gu Jianlong’s fenben ­a lbums, praises Gu’s precocious proficiency in drawing and his versatility in handling a wide repertory of subjects, including portraiture.13 Wang writes that Gu, determined to rise above the common level of professional painters, studied with a number of masters to broaden his skills. One might wonder how Wang Shimin, the most orthodox of the Orthodox school landscapists, could admire Gu Jianlong, an irredeemably Northern school artist who seems at first to exemplify everything Wang disapproved of in painting. But Wang’s colophon is not the only testimonial to their mutual esteem. In 1683, after Wang Shimin’s death, Gu Jianlong was shown a landscape that Wang had painted in 1651 (figure 1.5) and, presumably at the owner’s request, wrote a long inscription on it. In this he recalls his friendship with Wang

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1.4 Gu Jianlong or close follower, Emperor Xuanzong Spies on Yang Guifei Bath­ ing. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 151.5 x 87.9 cm. Yurinkan Museum, Kyoto. (For a detail, see figure 5.25.)

1.5 Wang Shimin (1592–1680), landscape in the manner of Huang Gongwang. Dated 1651. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 115.6 x 50.7 cm. Inscription by Gu Jianlong dated 1683. Matsushita collection, Tokyo.

over some fifty years, and praises him as heir to the lineage of Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), a revered literati master of the late Yuan period, and Dong Qichang, whose combined styles Wang indeed follows in the painting. Gu’s inscription scarcely differs in any respect, even in its calligraphic style, from what one of the Orthodox school landscapists themselves might have written. And Wang Shimin, when he wanted a group portrait representing himself and his family in their residence, requested or commissioned Gu Jianlong to make it (see figure 4.14). The paintings that Wang Shimin disdained in his writings as falling outside his Orthodox lineage were the work of errant contemporary landscapists—those who, as he put it, “try to produce new ideas” instead of following the old masters.14 Because Gu Jianlong was neither a landscapist nor a breaker of traditions, he was no threat to Wang Shimin’s cherished beliefs. The pictures Gu produced were not judged by the same criteria as Wang’s works and placed far below them; they rep-

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resented (as both would have agreed) another kind of painting, different in intent and function. And that difference is fundamental to the argument of this book. In some part it was a matter of social and economic class: Wang Shimin, as scion to a wealthy gentry family and a direct pupil of Dong Qichang, could never have painted pictures like those of Gu, even had his technique permitted it. And although some leaves in Gu Jianlong’s fenben album indicate that he could have painted good approximations of Wang’s pictures had he chosen to do so, the point is that no one would have asked him to. Seekers after paintings went to artists of certain types in the expectation of receiving the corresponding types of pictures. And the artists, though in principle free to paint whatever they chose, in practice stayed mostly within the bounds of those expectations. The Neglected North

For our traditional Chinese connoisseur, these contrasting pairs of works—Li Rihua’s landscape and the anonymous New Year’s picture, Wang Shimin’s landscape and Gu Jianlong’s picture of the bathing Yang Guifei—typify the differences between the Southern and Northern schools of painting that Dong Qichang famously formulated. This theory, or argument, is well known and often cited and discussed.15 In brief, the Southern and Northern schools have little or nothing to do with geography. The designations have instead been adopted from two schools, or lineages, of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. The Southern school in painting, named after the “sudden enlightenment” school of Chan, corresponded loosely to the tradition of the literati artists, together with the earlier masters they claimed as predecessors; the Northern school, named after the “gradual enlightenment” branch of Chan, comprised the professional and academy painters. Li Rihua and Wang Shimin, then, were Southern school masters, Gu Jianlong and the artist of the New Year’s picture typically Northern school. But because Dong Qichang had taken his terms from the two schools of Chan, implying an analogous distinction in painting, the formulation was, to say the least, rhetorically unbalanced: given a choice between Southern (sudden enlightenment, intuitive understanding) and Northern (gradual enlightenment, painstaking study), who would not choose the former? The powerful rhetorical advantage of Southern, in both its uses, has been potent in determining which Chan lineage, and which kind of painting, was admired, practiced, and studied. A revisionist scholar of Chan, Bernard Faure, has published a book that attempts to right the balance, recognizing that the Southern-Northern opposition is a misleading, historically unfounded construction and providing a less biased account of the doctrines and development of what came to be called the Northern school of Chan. A similar reassessment of the Northern school in painting is clearly in order.16 The dominance of the Southern school and its critical attitudes was based on far more than the term’s rhetorical advantage. The literati were educated men, usually from well-off families, who could attain official rank in the government bureaucracy by passing examinations in the classics; so they made up the Chinese administrative system at all levels below the imperial house, from those great ministers

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close to the emperor in the capital down to minor local officials. They also compiled the histories and wrote the books, thus establishing themselves as the supreme cultural authority of China. The acquaintance with old styles they gained through their privileged access to painting collections qualified them as connoisseurs and critics, and permitted them to include cultivated references to those old styles in their own artistic works. The principal source of Northern school styles, for artists of the later periods, was the work of painters who had been active in the Southern Song Imperial Academy or had practiced the same styles outside the Academy in the same period (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). This “academic” manner of painting, as it continued to be called (usually pejoratively) in the following centuries, was a skilled and polished manner of depicting figures and buildings in fine outline and color, plants and animals with close observation and accuracy, trees and rocks in descriptive brushstrokes that imparted naturalistic textures and volume, and of combining these elements as required by the pictorial theme and purpose to produce elaborate but clearly readable compositions. The professional-academy tradition appears to have assumed its lasting shape and stylistic repertory in this period, and was drawn on continually by conservative studio painters ever after. A great many Southern Song pictures in the academy styles were extant in Ming-Qing times, accessible to studio artists working in the cities, where major collections were mostly located. People who commissioned works from these artists for hanging or presentation, to decorate their houses with appropriate auspicious and seasonal scenes or to carry symbolic congratulatory messages (for instance, on someone’s birthday or retirement), normally expected pictures in these technically finished styles. They went to the local literati, or scholar-amateur, masters for paintings of other kinds, and used and valued them differently. The works of literati artists also sometimes served gift and occasional functions, although in principle they were not supposed to do so. Only a few of these urban studio artists rose to real prominence in the Ming: Du Jin in fifteenth and sixteenth century Nanjing; Zhou Chen, Qiu Ying, and Tang Yin a little later in Suzhou; Chen Hongshou in Hangzhou in the late Ming; a few others.17 Except for these few who achieved a measure of fame, Chinese studio artists’ status resembled that of the Japanese machi eshi (urban picture-makers). For instance, a number of late Ming and Qing portraitists, known from their names inscribed on paintings, are unrecorded in books on artists. They were called in when needed to execute a portrait, or sometimes only to contribute a portrait face to a painting by someone else; they were what in the West used to be called limners. A painter of this kind, even if included in the books supplying information on artists, was likely to receive only a line or two, telling where he was active and what his specialities were—“He was good at painting beautiful women, and also did portraits.” What else, within the Chinese biographical conventions, was there to say about him? If he did not hold an official post, belong to a gentry-official family, write books, or otherwise distinguish himself in some field outside his profession, the answer was: nothing at all.

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The Social Functions and The urban studio masters who produced functional paintings—to hang as decorStatus of Vernacular Paintings ation in one’s home, or to be presented as felicitations on public holidays or domestic occasions—fitted the subjects and styles to the function or occasion. These artists had large repertories that included pictures of popular deities and legendary figures as well as narrative and historical scenes. Figural subjects, usually set in domestic interiors or gardens, were central to their production; these are not works that celebrate reclusion in mountain retreats and the like. Terms used to praise literati painting, especially landscapes, did not apply to them: they neither embody “high-minded” attitudes nor “rise above the dusty world.” Because of their functionalism, traditional Chinese connoisseurs dismissed them as artistically inconsequential; in principle, they were not meant to elicit aesthetic contemplation or to express the artist’s feeling and temperament, as paintings in China mostly were supposed to do, to be taken seriously. Such judgments assumed that once the occasion for their use was past and their function fulfilled, occasional and functional pictures lost most of their value. They were not, as the Chinese phrase has it, “worthy of refined appreciation” and preservation as works of art. Only if the occasional paintings were by major artists of the past, such as Qiu Ying, would they be preserved; recent pictures by lesser masters ordinarily would not. An eighteenth-century writer named Zhai Hao, looking over the lists of paintings owned by the “wicked” grand secretary Yan Song (1480–1565), notes the inclusion among them of many birthday and other auspicious pictures, and criticizes these as “lowly” and “vulgar.”18 Zhai Hao’s judgment, however, is misdirected for two reasons. First, what we have for Yan Song is not a catalog of what he considered his collection, a list that would presumably have recorded only those pieces he took pride in owning. No such catalog was compiled during Yan’s lifetime. The longer of the two surviving lists of his paintings is part of an uncritical inventory of objects of value in his possession—representing, supposedly, the wealth he had amassed through bribery and corruption—that were confiscated from his household after he was deposed. Second, as Zhai Hao himself points out, many or most of the “vulgar” paintings were probably acquired as gifts from well-wishers (and influenceseekers) felicitating this powerful personage and his family members on birthdays and other occasions. The shorter list was compiled by Wen Jia (1501–83), son of the great literati painter Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) and himself a noted artist and connoisseur. The paintings he chose to include in it are all by famous-name masters, except for a few early anonymous pieces listed at the end. In effect, Wen Jia was compiling Yan Song’s “collection” catalog, applying his skills as connoisseur to judge which pieces merited inclusion. The longer list contains hundreds of paintings for which only titles and sometimes artists’ names are given. In this, by contrast, more than half of the works are anonymous; many others are by Ming professional and academy artists, or are attributed to Song-Yuan masters. Because only a few of these attributed works appear in Wen Jia’s list, their authenticity is doubtful. The birthday paintings mostly appear in this larger list, together with other auspicious images—pictures of Zhong

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Kui, the exorcist of demons; narrative and historical pictures with political implications; popular religious images; meiren pictures of unidentified authorship; and diverse other works. These, we can assume, were the paintings used in Yan’s household for auspicious and decorative hanging.19 They belong, loosely, in the same category as the paintings Gu Jianlong made for Wang Shimin and his other clients, without much hope that this work would ever be included in their “collections.” We can assume that large, rich families commonly divided their holdings of paintings into functional and “fine” art, although the distinction need not have been a sharp one. Proper catalogs compiled for later collections ordinarily do not include the functional paintings so numerous in the Yan Song inventory, or works by recent and contemporary artists. Such paintings, however, could no doubt have been seen hanging, enjoyed but not (in principle) aesthetically appreciated or treasured, in the houses of the same collectors. Their collection pieces could be shown with pride to knowledgeable visitors, and besides serving as indicators of status also functioned as investments, tangible components of the family wealth, which could (unless badly chosen) be pawned or resold to raise money as needed. Presumably they passed their functional and decorative pieces down through generations as part of the family heritage; these works were unlikely to enter the art market or to be acquired by serious collectors, except when furnished with false signatures or attributions aimed at legitimizing them. The likelihood of their long-term preservation was thus much smaller. An especially valuable source of information on how paintings were hung in the houses of affluent and cultivated people is a passage in the Zhangwu Zhi, a book now well known through a study by Craig Clunas, who renders the title Treatise on Superfluous Things, that is, luxury goods that did not primarily serve practical functions.20 The author of the treatise was another descendant of Wen Zhengming, his great-grandson Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645). Like Wen Jia, he drew on his family connections (his brother served briefly as grand secretary) and his own upbringing in an atmosphere of cultural refinement to present himself as an arbiter of taste and elegant living. His book offers, among other things, advice to new collectors on such questions as quality and authenticity in antiques and how these should be conserved and displayed. His “Calendar for the Displaying of Scrolls” reads in part (as translated by R. H. van Gulik), On New Year’s morning you should display Song paintings of the Gods of Happiness and images of the Sages of olden times. . . . In the second moon there should be repre­ sentations of ladies enjoying spring walks, of plum blossoms, apricots, camellia, orchids, and peach and pear blossoms. On the third day of the third moon there should be shown Song pictures of the Dark Warrior. . . . On the eighth day of the fourth moon, the birthday of Buddha, you should display representations of Buddha by Song and Yuan artists, or Buddhist pictures woven in silk dating from the Song period. On the fourteenth day of that moon you should show images of Lü Dongbin, also painted by artists of the Song dynasty. . . .

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During the sixth moon there should be displayed large Song or Yuan pictures of towers and palaces, of forests and rocks, of high mountain peaks, of parties gathering lotus flowers, of summer resorts, and similar scrolls. On the seventh evening of the seventh moon there should be displayed pictures of girls praying for skill in needle work, of the Goddess of Weaving, of towers and palaces, of banana trees, of noble ladies, and suchlike representations . . . while during the eleventh moon there should be paintings of snow landscapes, winter plum trees, water lilies, Yang Guifei indulging in wine, and suchlike pictures. During the twelfth moon there should be scrolls showing Zhong Kui inviting good luck and chasing away devils or of Zhong Kui marrying off his sister. . . . Further, on the occasion of changing your abode you may display pictures like that of Ge Hong moving to the Lofou Mountain, while on the occasion of an anniversary there should be shown images of the God of Longevity by artists of the Song Imperial Academy or representations of the Queen of the Western Paradise. If you are praying for clear weather, hang on your wall an image of the Sun God, and when praying for rain, pictures of transcendental dragons sporting in wind and rain. . . . Thus all scrolls should be displayed according to the season so as to indicate the time of the year and the various calendar festivals.21

Yan Song’s inventory and Wen Zhenheng’s calendar match up well: one could fulfill, more or less, the calendar’s stipulations for what to hang by drawing on the pictures listed in the inventory. Together they provide a good indication not only of the practice of hanging scrolls of different subjects to suit season and occasion, but also of the demands that were placed on professional painters, as well as on the antiques market and the studios of forgers, who supplied “Song paintings” (such as are stipulated in Wen Zhenheng’s list) for a demand that must have vastly exceeded the authentic supply. The urban studio masters responded to similar demands. But their output was by no means limited to domestic uses; they also made paintings intended for hanging and viewing in other settings and contexts: public and semipublic places in the pleasure districts of the cities, such as restaurants and brothels. Some of them painted illustrations to fiction and drama; some represented subjects that can properly be classified as erotic, whether soft-core pictures of “beauties” (meiren), often with coded sexual allusions, or hard-core erotic albums. The primary function of these, as of erotica today, was to entertain and arouse—principally the male viewers but sometimes, if we can believe Chinese fictional accounts and other written evidence along with the paintings themselves, female viewers as well. But the best of them evoke sensations and feelings far beyond simple titillation. Urban Professional Masters in High Qing Painting

The clientele and viewership for these paintings cannot be identified more narrowly than as the well-off inhabitants of the great prosperous cities of China. From the late Ming, members of old gentry families, new merchant families, elites of all kinds had moved in large numbers to the cities, where they made up a rich mix of people of diverse occupations and backgrounds.22 The time was long past when landed gentry and literati were clearly set off socially from merchants; now a single family might have members in both groups, and even a single person could move easily between

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one role and another. What one writer calls a “culture of mid-level merchants” emerged in the late period on which I focus, when “successful landlords, merchants, artisans and officials tended to associate socially on a basis of approximate equality.”23 Patronage for painting came from correspondingly diverse groups.24 The High Qing period, as the term is commonly used, covers the reigns of the three great Manchu emperors, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong (1662–1795); I extend the term to reach roughly from the dynasty’s founding in 1644 to the end of the eighteenth century. Accounts of the painting of this period in art-historical writings are commonly constructed in terms of broad polarities. For the early Qing (second half of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth), the poles are the Orthodox school landscapists, made up of the so-called Four Wangs and others who trace their lineage in a conservative descent from Dong Qichang, and the masters known collectively as the Individualists. For the middle Qing (roughly the remainder of the eighteenth century) the opposition is usually described as between a continuation of Orthodox-school landscape and the production of the so-called Eccentric Masters of Yangzhou. Lesser local schools and artists working outside these major trends have been recognized and studied, as has the painting of the Imperial Painting Academy in Beijing.25 But the Orthodox versus Individualist and Orthodox versus Yangzhou formulations still underlie most accounts. Although the two schools in each are placed in opposition to each other, they are customarily taken to represent together a polarized main line of development in these periods. Yangzhou painting, in particular, is hailed as liberating, an escape from an orthodoxy in landscape that was by this time already in decline. My purpose is not to upset altogether these formulations, which contain some truth and serve to bring some order to the plethora of great and small masters and diverse stylistic directions. I want only to supplement the accounts of early and middle Qing painting, and later Chinese painting more generally, by drawing together and introducing the missing component, the deeply interesting category of paintings dealt with in this book. It cannot properly be termed a school, being too dispersed for that, both geographically and chronologically, nor is it properly a movement. In a preliminary, working definition it consists of works by studio artists active in the cities during the High Qing period, especially in the Jiangnan or Yangtze delta region but also in the north. Their paintings were in some sense functional, and stylistically within the great Chinese professional-academic tradition extending back to the Song period, with the addition of some new elements of style drawn from European pictorial art. Chinese artists had access to new representational techniques, especially illusionistic ones, adopted from European pictures (chiefly engravings, but also some oil paintings) beginning in the late sixteenth century, and used them in diverse forms and contexts. These techniques, or pictorial ideas, were crucial to the development of urban studio painting in the early and middle Qing. I have addressed this large phenomenon in a number of writings, and will only outline here the forms it took in paintings, so that I can take it up again in chapter 3.26

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Many of the illustrations in this book are pictures of figures in interior settings, or outdoor-indoor scenes. They differ markedly from the relatively few figuresin-interiors compositions painted by Chinese artists during preceding centuries. Notably, they exhibit a new mastery of techniques for representing interior space, often with elaborate systems of openings from foreground spaces to others farther back, and of positioning figures within these spaces. Some of them display also a mastery, or at least a determined employment, of light-and-shadow effects. It appears clear that these new techniques were largely inspired by the Chinese artists’ acquaintance with European pictures, especially northern European, Dutch and Flemish ones, and were in part learned from those pictures, though never through slavish copying or imitation—the Chinese painters quickly and artfully turned their appropriations to their own special purposes. And in doing so they opened a new chapter in Chinese painting of figures in interiors, a genre that had seriously occupied artists up to the Five Dynasties and early Song, the tenth century (as seen, for instance, even in the surviving late-Song copy of Gu Hongzhong’s Han Xizai’s Night Revels composition) 27 but had generally languished in the intervening centuries, exhibiting little innovation even in the hands of mid-Ming artists of the stature of Qiu Ying and Tang Yin (1470–1523). Gu Jianlong appears to have been a pivotal figure in the transition to this new mode, as he is for a number of the developments that this book will treat. Although it may be that no single painting by Gu impresses us as truly brilliant, as do some works by his contemporaries among the Individualist masters of landscape, his whole achievement, considered in context, is nonetheless impressive. What he and other early Qing urban studio masters of the Jiangnan cities inherited was the “low tradition” of Suzhou pian, the dismissive collectors’ term for paintings produced by followers of Qiu Ying and Tang Yin working in Suzhou studios in the later Ming and early Qing. Much of the output of these epigones consisted of copies and forgeries of Song-Yuan painting, or of the works of Qiu and Tang themselves. What Gu and other transitional masters passed on to studio artists active over the century or so that followed was a number of new or rejuvenated subject types and genres, as well as stylistic innovations, that were instrumental in bringing new life to a tradition of professional painting that had fallen into decline. The new mastery of complex and readable spatial systems permitted painters to employ these for narrative purposes, as well as for ascribing depths of feeling to the people they depicted and evoking nuances of relationships between them; it also engaged the viewer more fully by seeming to draw the gaze into the depicted space. Gu Jianlong employed these techniques skillfully, as seen in his illustrational and erotic albums (see figures 4.37, 5.4, and 5.6). His interiors are not so illusionistically spacious and visually penetrable as those by some later artists would be—much of the older, flatter Suzhou mode persists in his pictures, partly because he did not attempt to render light and shade as strongly or convincingly as others would do. The technique of using shadowy areas to increase the readability of spaces was adopted only later—an early example, from 1697, is by the Yangzhou master Yu Zhi­

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ding (1647–1710 or after), who creates a shadowed alcove behind a draped curtain and places in it a melancholy woman waiting for her lover (see figure 5.18). From the early eighteenth century, both techniques were taken up and practiced at the Imperial Academy in Beijing, where the development of a semi-Westernized illusionistic manner was further stimulated by the active presence of European Jesuit artists, notably Giuseppe Castiglione (Chinese name Lang Shining, 1688–1766). These Western-inspired techniques were not, then, adopted for sheer novelty or exoticism, but because they permitted the painter to engage the viewer with the imagery of the picture in ways that Chinese painting after the Song Dynasty had largely lost the capacity to do. The loss, one hastens to add, had come about through a process of deliberate rejection, reflecting a distaste among the most prestigious Yuan and Ming painters for illusionism of all kinds, which they scornfully referred to as xingsi (form likeness) and ranked lowest on a scale of value criteria in painting. The foreign-derived illusionistic techniques paralleled, in their purpose and for the genres in which they were adopted, the new kind of portraiture practiced in the same late-Ming period by Tseng Qing (1568–1650) and others, as well as the contemporaneous revival in Nanjing and elsewhere of the Northern Song monumental, and relatively naturalistic, mode of landscape painting.28 In all three subject categories (and in others as well, e.g., some heavily colored flower paintings by Yun Shou­ ping, 1633–90), techniques adopted from European pictures combined with elements of native Chinese style that had long fallen into disuse and were now rediscovered to enhance the “reality” of the images—which is not the same as making them more realistic; they are certainly not that by Western criteria. A New Genre in Ming-Qing Figure Pictures: Paintings for Women?

There is a sense, however, in which these paintings can be called realistic, within the Chinese painting tradition. That sense can perhaps be best understood through some parallels, inexact but suggestive, with developments in Chinese literature of the same period. The late Ming–early Qing is now recognized in all fields of Chinese studies as an age of great economic and social changes, which affected every aspect of the culture. Rising prosperity, along with urbanization and a great increase in the production of printed books, meant more widespread education and literacy, an expanded readership that stimulated the production of popular and vernacular forms of literature to meet a new demand. Similarly, a great increase in the number of families sufficiently well off to aspire to elegant living created a demand for paintings to hang and present on various occasions, as stipulated by Wen Zhenheng’s calendar, or simply to enjoy—paintings of the kinds this book is about. The writers of the new fiction and drama turned away from the high-minded themes of classical Chinese learning (while sometimes echoing or even parodying them), as well as from the unnaturalness of the literary language, to explore a “low mimetic” mode—in Northrop Frye’s definition, “a mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of action which is roughly on our own level, as in most comedy and realistic fiction.”29 The painters of our pictures, as we will see,­similarly break out of the limited thematic range of traditional painting, devoted as that

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was to edifying and symbolic subjects, all deliberately distanced from quotidian life. They create their own version of a low mimetic mode for painting, portraying scenes and situations that could be imagined as occurring, not as defining moments in the careers of Confucian exemplars or historical personages, or in the ideal lives of lofty scholars inhabiting an unreal realm, but as small events and epiphanies in the everyday lives of the real people who made up their viewership. This remains true even when the pictures also commemorate occasions, illustrate narratives, or carry erotic messages. Like fiction written in the vernacular, they fulfill, with their evocative incidents, richly detailed settings, and descriptive styles, “the aesthetic expectation of a ‘realistic’ representation of some phase of human experience.”30 At their best, they can convey that quality that Susanne K. Langer, in a memorable phrase, calls “a passage of ‘felt life.’ ”31 It is exactly this basic shift in mode, in effect creating a new genre, that opens Chinese painting, at least the kinds with which we are concerned, to wider participation by women, both as artists and as viewers of the paintings. 32 Ian Watt, noting the importance of female readers in the rise of the English realistic novel, quotes Henry James’s tribute: “Women are delicate and patient observers; they hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They feel and perceive the real with a kind of tact.”33 David Johnson, writing about the readership for popular Chinese literature, points out that women “must have remained much closer to the main currents of non-elite culture; they had not been taught to prefer the monuments of the great literary tradition, the subtleties of classical scholarship, the systems of the approved philosophers. These literate, well-to-do women must also have formed a significant audience for popular written literature.”34 That the vernacular language was easier to learn was of course a factor—the early Qing writer Li Yu advises that when one is educating a concubine, it is best to start her off with vernacular fiction, for that reason. 35 But Johnson’s point is nonetheless valid. The same assumptions can be made—short of proof, but compelling in the light of all the circumstances this book will explore—about the likelihood of women having been engaged in choosing and using popular or vernacular paintings, which similarly presented familiar materials in traditional representational styles, free of allusions to the old masters and the like. It may well have been the wife or the matriarch of the household who selected paintings for seasonal hanging and family occasions, with the artists responding to her understood taste, while the dominant male chose the more prestigious name-artist paintings for the family collection. That women were mostly excluded from the male world of connoisseurship and collecting can be judged from Dong Qichang’s listing of five conditions under which calligraphy and paintings should not be shown: the fifth, following bad weather and vulgar guests, is “in the presence of a woman.”36 But there were exceptions, notably in the late Ming, for cultivated courtesans and concubines who moved easily in the company of men, and who were sometimes present at gatherings where calligraphy and paintings were produced and appreciated. 37 The same was no doubt sometimes true of educated gentry wives in the Qing period; and in

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any case, numerous examples attest that women could own and appreciate paintings in the quiet of their domestic spheres. David Johnson continues, “It is not surprising, therefore, that . . . one of the hallmarks of true popular literature in China is the heroine who initiates actions, who is one of the moving forces of the plot, and who is not submissive but who, on the contrary, struggles against the restrictions of conventional domestic morality.” Again, something similar can be said of the paintings we will consider: although some of them, especially those of the meiren and erotic genres, treat women as objects of desire, others afford them more individuality and dignity than they had commonly enjoyed in traditional Chinese painting. We will even argue for a loose gender distinction in the intended clienteles for these two large categories, with the more overtly erotic types being aimed primarily at a male viewership, those that present women more as subjects in their own right at a female one—or at viewers, regardless of gender, whose responses were not primarily sexually determined. This argument will be developed, and some evidence presented, at suitable points in the chapters that follow. Suzhou and Suzhou pian

The main locus for the production of such painting in the late Ming and early Qing appears to have been the city of Suzhou and its environs. The very center of both professional and scholar-amateur painting through most of the Ming, Suzhou by the late sixteenth century had slipped into decline, in the eyes of influential critics; it was cast into shadow by nearby Songjiang, where Dong Qichang and his adherents were creating and promoting a powerful new mode of literati painting, chiefly landscape, that quickly came to be accepted as the touchstone for high-level painting, the kind that collectors should seek and artists aspire to. Suzhou painting was cast, in this scenario, as the survival of an outmoded tradition, commercialized, trivial or vulgar in its subjects, conservative in its styles. Despite the presence of a few innovative but underrated painters in late-Ming Suzhou, notably Zhang Hong (1577–ca. 1652), the painting scene there was dominated, in the critics’ view, by the numerous followers and imitators of the great early sixteenth-century professional masters Tang Yin and Qiu Ying. Some of these followers devoted their skills to producing the Suzhou pian that were described earlier as made up mostly of copies and forgeries of earlier masters, including Qiu and Tang themselves but also the great Song and Yuan painters. 38 Use of the term commonly extends also to original paintings by Suzhou small masters of the late Ming and Qing: the writer of the Chinese entry for the New Year’s picture (figure 1.2) in the catalog in which it was first published (see note 2 above), for instance, calls it a Suzhou pian, in effect removing it from serious consideration. What has gone unremarked in this standard, dismissive account is a high-level continuation in late Ming–early Qing Suzhou of figure painting as it had been practiced earlier in the Ming by Qiu Ying and his daughter Qiu Zhu (also known as Qiu Shi, “Miss Qiu,” since her given name is uncertain). Qiu Ying’s wide repertory had encompassed sensitive portrayals of women, and Qiu Zhu had made a speciality of

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them: pictures of the woman waiting genre, of literary and cultivated women, of women engaged in leisurely pursuits in gardens. Artists who were in some sense their followers will appear throughout this book, together with others from other places and later periods, and will be seen to achieve striking innovations while remaining within this lineage. One from the late Ming is Wang Sheng, who is the artist of the earliest extant erotic album attributable to a particular master, but also of a picture of a woman playing a flute in a garden, done in 1614. Another Suzhou figure master, Shen Shigeng, painted in 1642 a woman in a garden picking mulberry leaves and gazing at a pair of amorous dogs, a coded indication that she is thinking of her absent husband. (Qiu Ying did similar pictures in which the woman gazes at mandarin ducks instead of dogs.) 39 In seeming to give pictorial expression to specifically feminine concerns, these are good candidates for the still-hypothetical category of paintings intended for women to acquire and enjoy. Suzhou in this period was the very center of what Dorothy Ko calls “a floating world,” a “mobile and fluid society” that had come into being in the Jiangnan region through the influx of money and sweeping changes in the social order. Commentators of the time, she writes, “were all too aware of the incongruity between realities in this floating world and the idealized Confucian order frozen in terms of such binaries as high/low, senior/junior, or male/female.” 40 Kathryn Lowry, quoting Ko and building on her perception in a study of Suzhou popular songs and courtesan’s songs, notes that it was this “blurring of categories that attracted seventeenth-century readers to the literature on desire (qing),” along with the prestige of the city as “the most cosmopolitan of places,” with its “range of written materials, goods, and social practices that led people [in other places] to emulate Suzhou ways.” 41 Suzhou paintings of the kinds that concern us from the same period can also be seen as fitting comfortably into this large cultural phenomenon, with their high technique, visual elegance, and association in many cases with women. Their “blurring of categories” such as high/low and male/female, on the other hand, no doubt accounts for some of the denigration they received from literati writers, especially by Dong Qichang and his followers in Songjiang.42 The creation and appreciation of paintings for this Suzhou pian market in Suzhou and the very different production of landscapes in literati styles in Songjiang, while we have been in the habit of lumping them together in “late Ming painting,” can be recognized as making up two somewhat separate systems, one producing pictures of attractive and popular subjects in accessible styles that demanded no connoisseurship and could be enjoyed by viewers of either gender, the other concentrating primarily on landscape, deeply involved with stylistic references to the old masters and the brushwork or hand of the individual artist, and demanding high levels of connoisseurship to determine authenticity and quality. The world of the connoisseurs was a male one from which, as noted earlier, women were mostly excluded. Some Suzhou figure specialists in the early Qing period took the important step of placing the women in interiors, making use of the new spatial techniques discussed earlier. One of them, unfortunately unidentified (the work bears a false Qiu

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Ying signature), painted an eight-leaf album of uncommonly subtle and sensitive pictures of women, alone or in pairs, in domestic settings; this album will be central to our discussion of paintings probably done for women (see figures 4.26–28). Gu Jianlong in an early erotic album, and the anonymous painter of a closely related album, include, in addition to a few leaves in which sexual activities are openly depicted, others in which women and men appear in varied situations and relationships, all having to do with love affairs and attempted seductions.43 No comparable albums of interiors occupied only by men are known to me; it is difficult to imagine what the theme of such an album would be, within the low mimetic mode. We are observing, perhaps, a new pictorial reflection of the traditional separation of nei, inner or feminine, from wai, outer or masculine, as the latter was represented in images of landscape, often with (male) recluses.44 More important, we are also observing, in the new popularity from the early Qing period on of pictures of men and women relating in untraditional, seemingly real-life patterns within domestic interiors, some reflection of a new awareness, in writing and painting, that the perceived locus for romantic love had shifted. Up to the late Ming it was typically situated in scholar-beauty liaisons between literati and courtesans, and the cultivated courtesans were central figures not only in the real events but also in the idealized versions portrayed in fiction and poetry, much of the latter written by themselves. In the Qing, courtesans were deposed from any central role in the production of the literature of qing or emotional feeling, replaced by gentry women or guixiu from literary families, who were the leading women writers of this later period. The guixiu were understandably more inclined to take as their subjects for poetry and prose their own family concerns and their relations with both men and other women. Love and other relationships within the household now come to the fore in the thematics of poetry and painting: as Susan Mann points out, “women’s writings opened new paths to intimacy, revealing wives, daughters, and sisters as masters of high culture who were newly intelligible as human beings to their erudite husbands, fathers, and brothers.” 45 Their poems can be expressions of love—usually moderated, to avoid compromising their reputations—or can be complaints over their neglect or abandonment by men who are too long absent, or who turn their attention to other women.46 Another painting that appears to fit this new pattern, more elaborate because of its larger hanging-scroll format, is by Wang Qiao, a Suzhou figure master whose dated works range from 1657 to 1680. A Woman at Her Dressing Table (figure 1.6) was painted in 1657.47 The artist has signed it simply with the date and his name; the long inscription in upper left is a poem by an early nineteenth-century woman writer, Zhou Qi, who was herself a painter. The scene is morning in the boudoir of a woman who, judging from the painting itself, might be a courtesan, but might also be a wife or concubine in a prosperous household. She sits at a table looking into a mirror while her maid does her hair; another maid is making up the bed beyond. The rumpled bedclothes and clothing draped hurriedly over a stool at right identify the scene, as they commonly do in erotic paintings, as the aftermath of a sexual

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1.6 Wang Qiao (active 1657–80), A Woman at Her Dressing Table. Dated 1657. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 100 x 58 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, gift of Ruth and Bruce Dayton.

e­ ncounter. Zhou Qi’s poem (see the appendix, a translation by Ellen Widmer) makes it clear that she reads the picture as representing a cultivated courtesan repairing the ravages of a night of lovemaking.48 Her poem is addressed to the woman, almost like a love poem, and it is true that guixiu were sometimes themselves engaged in love affairs with courtesans. However we read the painting, it clearly belongs within the new low mimetic mode. In its simple spatial scheme and in the relatively small size of the figures within the composition, the picture exemplifies the early Qing type of women in interiors developed in Suzhou. The fine, supple, “feminine” line drawing further relates it to that group.49 As a representation of a woman in her boudoir, with only restrained sexual overtones, it is decidedly at the cool end of a scale of erotic intensity; how warmer and hot pictures of the same subject might look, pictures presumably aimed more at a male audience, will be revealed in chapter 5. The Survival of Vernacular Paintings

The development from the late Ming onward of a popular, vernacular literature has by today become a well-recognized, heavily studied part of Chinese literary history. The corresponding rise of urban studio painting, and within it the new genre that I take to be in part aimed at a female viewership, has received no such recognition or attention. One reason is that literary texts, even those of a kind depreciated, ignored, and even banned in late-period China, could not so easily be eradicated: copies survived in Japan, or in unsuspected places in China, and could be recovered, reprinted, and studied when the old taboos broke down in the twentieth century. The same is true of pictorial prints, including woodblock-printed illustrations: produced in multiples, they have a good chance of survival, if sometimes only in unique copies, and can easily be reprinted and disseminated. The scholarly literature on these, accordingly, is relatively full. Paintings, by contrast, unless replicated by hand copying (and such copies, in the connoisseur’s view, had little value and were scarcely worth preserving), are one-of-a-kind objects, and depend for their preservation on transmission through a succession of collections in which they are cared for and, when necessary, remounted. In the cases of the paintings that are our concern, such a history was highly unlikely. All the critical biases operating within the Chinese tradition of collecting and connoisseurship worked against their survival: their popular and functional character; their traditional styles (in which the artist’s distinctive handwriting was typically not displayed); their low mimetic, “trivial” content; the production of many of them in Suzhou; the association of some (if I am right) with a largely female audience; their exclusion from the desirable category of genuine works by name artists; the common practice in later times of adding false signatures to them, attributing them to masters earlier and more famous than the ones who painted them. This last practice places the paintings in a category that, though scarcely peculiar to China, is unusually common there. In addition to genuine paintings by known artists and deliberate copies and forgeries of them, a large number of paintings

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survive that did not originate as forgeries at all, but were caught in a peculiarly Chinese trap: too high in quality and pictorial interest to be discarded, but lacking the name identifications that would place them in the ranks of marketable and collectible commodities, they have had their original identifying marks (signatures and seals of less-known masters) removed and have been fitted out by dealers and owners, over the centuries, with erroneous attributions, spurious inscriptions and seals, misleading identifications of subjects—all designed to move them, however dishonestly, out of undesirable authorial and thematic categories and into desirable ones. Zhe-school landscapes by lesser Ming artists are ascribed to great Song-period landscapists; works by lesser followers of some prestigious master are credited to the master himself; most to the point for this book, Ming-Qing pictures of figural subjects in the academic manner are reattributed to famous early figure painters, with added titles reidentifying their subjects. Paintings of this kind are found in large numbers in old collections outside China, especially those assembled by discerning collectors such as Charles Lang Freer (donor of the original collection of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), collectors whose eye for quality was not matched—could not be, in their time—with the kind of expertise that would permit sound judgments of date, school, and authorship. Paintings in this group might equally be assigned to the “anonymous” category, and in fact do fall into it once the misleading attributions are stripped away from them. Still another category of surviving works is paintings that, for diverse reasons having to do with their subjects, styles, and original functions, were excluded from the range of what was held to be art, or fine art. (And yes, we can recognize that Chinese critics and connoisseurs did make distinctions similar enough to ours between art and non-art, as well as between good and bad art, that we can, if we choose, legitimately go on using those terms.) Out of a huge output of pictorial matter, the Chinese arbiters of taste and quality in any period dictated what deserved to be preserved and collected, mounted and remounted as the need arose, appreciated and written about, rescued from the burning house—what should, in short, make up the history of Chinese painting. That the vernacular paintings of this book were among the works excluded is another major reason for their poor survival rate. Today we can explore beyond the fences erected by the literati critics and collectors, using whatever surviving works can still be located and identified in attempts to reconstruct the excluded areas. Most of all, we can revisit and revise our evaluations of the kinds of functional, decorative, entertaining, and otherwise “lowclass” Chinese painting that have been considered beyond the pale. That they were considered so by Dong Qichang and other Ming-Qing literati critics is understandable, given the personal investment of these men in promoting the doctrines of literati painting. What is strange is that none of the successive twentieth-century movements aimed at opening up non-elite areas of Chinese culture for appreciation and study has given these paintings any attention. When Hu Shih, the great champion of vernacular literature and of writing in the colloquial language, made what is (so far as I know) his only published statement on Chinese

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painting, one might have expected him to call for a corresponding recognition of what can properly be called vernacular painting. Instead, he adopted the very position he was battling against on the literary front, serving up yet again the familiar literati claim that whereas such other arts as architecture and sculpture were “deficient” in China because they “remained in the hands of uneducated artisans and . . . have not had the illuminating touch of men of advanced education, rich experience, and refined taste,” calligraphy and painting came to be “preeminent” through being “the only two fine arts which the scholarly class in China has taken up and developed to such heights.”50 In the early years of the People’s Republic, some other previously undervalued kinds of painting began at last to be studied and published—portraiture, temple wall painting, works of the Zhe school in the Ming and the Imperial Academy in the Qing—and whole academic departments were formed to study and promote the popular prints called nianhua (New Year’s pictures). But paintings of the kind introduced in this book, though amply represented in study collections and museum storage rooms in China, somehow never made their way into the politically positive category of “people’s art,” and the neglect continued. A 1958 book on “artisan painters of the people” (minjian huagong) was devoted to wall paintings in tombs and temples, anonymous portraiture, nian­ hua, and the like, and quite blind to the productions of the urban studio masters. These apparently were not popular enough, or were popular in the wrong way. 51 Such a consistent pattern of neglect and marginalization impels the question: have Chinese paintings of this kind deserved to be ignored because they really are so vulgar, or of such low quality? The illustrations of the present book will quickly convince any reader, I hope, of the absurdity of that view. The neglect owes, rather, to everyone—specialist scholars as well as collectors and museum curators—having consciously or unconsciously adopted the pro-literati biases that pervade virtually the entire literature on the subject. Because of the low esteem in which they were held by the literati who wrote the books, paintings of the kinds dealt with here are seldom mentioned in literary sources. Whatever we can say about them has to be pieced together from scattered clues, just as the paintings themselves, only thinly represented in major collections and publications, have had to be sought out and assembled from untraditional holdings. Among such holdings are lesser collections (or forgotten corners of great collections) in China and Japan, including Japanese dealers’ stocks; old European and American collections, for the reasons noted above; and auction catalogs, which make up a rich source for what is commonly thought of as secondary or even minor material. The misleading attributions that encumber them must be stripped away, the misidentifications of subjects corrected, before they can be effectively dealt with. The task of assembling and assessing the pictures, against these difficulties of access and identification, has required some years of work and will require many more; the present book is only a first step. Some of the pictures bear reliable signatures of identifiable artists, but many more “float free,” essentially anonymous—when the signatures or seals are those of well-

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known masters, these are frequently spurious, as the paintings do not agree in style with more acceptable works by the same artists. The true authorship of such pictures, their dates of execution and places and circumstances of creation, are thus not easily to be determined. These are questions that could not even be addressed effec­ tively until the paintings had been brought together and considered as a group. Individual style, in any case, is not really to the point in these paintings, and individual hands can seldom be decisively identified among them, although we can form stylistic groups among the unsigned or misattributed works and speculate about their authorship. The painters tended to work, as the masters of the Song Imperial Academy had mostly worked, in a deliberately impersonal mode, sometimes employing studio assistants, concerned more with the excellence and salability of their pictures than with the display of distinct artistic personalities. Although questions of authorship have traditionally been paramount among the concerns of Chinese connoisseurs and scholars, they need not be so for us. The position and significance of the paintings within Qing society, how they functioned in certain situations and how people of their time understood them, along with their intrinsic artistic worth, may well be matters of greater interest. But these, in turn, cannot be effectively pursued until some broad art-historical, geographical, and sociological aspects of their production have been clarified. The attempt to do so will draw us into large issues of Qing cultural history, such as the growth of a lively popular culture in the pleasure districts of the cities, including what has been called the courtesan culture, and the relationship between two great centers, the one economic and the other political—the Jiangnan cities in the south and the imperial court in the north. Plan of the Book

During the dozen or more years in which I was writing this book, a number of subthemes opened that seemed important enough to warrant being followed up at length, and I did so, even at the risk of giving the book a somewhat episodic character. Several of these, such as the engagement of women as probable clientele and viewership for some vernacular painting and the rise of a school of vernacular figure painting in Beijing in the eighteenth century, are discussed in different contexts in successive chapters. I hope readers will understand the reasons behind this odd organization and tolerate what might seem failures of clear continuity. Chapter 2 opens by introducing some urban studio artists active in the Jiangnan cities in early Qing, to define further the type, and goes on to recount how some of them traveled north to Beijing in search of patronage, or were invited there to become members of the Academy of Painting in the imperial court. They carried with them not only their styles but also the fruits of their immersion in the popular culture of the southern cities, which exerted a strong attraction on the Manchu rulers. A striking instance of this northward movement and its reception within the court, centered on a minor Yangzhou master and his son and grandson, serves to open a new, erotically tinged episode in the history of Manchu–Han Chinese relations. A discussion of court painters who were absent from the court during the Yongzheng

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era (1723–35) concludes the chapter and prepares the way for a somewhat speculative account of how these and other artists working outside the court can be recognized as making up a “northern school” of vernacular figure painting in the Yongzheng and Qianlong (1735–95) eras. Chapter 3 explores how the artists of vernacular painting, along with many others of their age, adopted representational techniques and elements of style from Western (European) pictures that were by this time accessible to them, and how this appropriation opened to them new ways of composing their paintings, especially interiors with figures, with spatial complexities that allowed greater clarity of relationships and new expressive effects. Painters working in the imperial court, in particular, were encouraged or commanded to develop the semi-Westernized styles favored by their imperial masters. Some of them learned the rules of linear perspective from Jesuits serving at the court or from other foreign sources. I stress the importance of distinguishing this Italian system of perspective, which was not much employed outside the court, from northern European (Dutch and Flemish) modes of rendering space and solid form, which Chinese artists found more congenial and adaptable to their purposes. The growth of a northern school of vernacular figure painting in the Beijing region is further pursued, and within it some especially successful fusions of foreign and Chinese styles are recognized. Chapter 4 deals with the repertories of these artists, offering examples of the kinds of subjects they depicted, including pictures for New Year’s celebrations, birthdays, and other occasions, and discussing how these might have functioned within the society of the time. The question of whether certain types were directed toward women is raised again in the context of a discussion of family group portraits and other family scenes. A section on narrative paintings leads into a con­ sideration of cityscapes, with special attention to one remarkable example, a hand­ scroll depicting the busy pleasure district at the foot of Tiger Hill near Suzhou. Throughout, the more open expressiveness of the vernacular works is contrasted with the stiffer, cooler styles of the Academy and other more “elevated” figure painting. Chapter 5 is devoted to pictures related somehow in their subjects to the flourishing courtesan culture of the Ming-Qing period. The question is raised of where such paintings were hung or displayed, and provisional answers attempted on the basis of scanty available evidence. A discussion of large changes in societal attitudes toward romantic love and erotic feelings between the Ming-Qing transition and the mid-eighteenth century, a contextual theme introduced in the fourth chapter, is expanded here as a background for a consideration of changes in the subjects and styles of paintings from the same periods. The remainder of the chapter offers a first detailed and scholarly account of the popular genre of meiren hua, or beautiful-woman paintings. The question of female nudity in Chinese painting is briefly considered and illustrated by a few examples. A conclusion reiterates some large assumptions underlying the approach I have used in the book, and expresses hopes for follow-up studies of its materials and topics.

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two

Studio Artists in Cities and Court

Small Masters in the Cities Among the identifiable artists who painted the pictures we are considering, many turn out to be minor or secondary masters who worked in the thriving Jiangnan or Yangtze delta cities. They may have come from other places, but they established their studios and made their reputations in the great urban centers, where patronage was to be found. With few exceptions, we know little about them except their names, their birthplaces, and their specialities, which are recorded in dictionaries of artists and can be matched with signatures and seals on extant paintings. Those who made strong reputations for themselves in the cities might be introduced to the imperial court in Beijing by some local official serving there and be given a post in the Imperial Painting Academy. The Academy was in fact made up, until the mideighteenth century, principally of artists who had come from the south. The Qing Dynasty rulers were Manchus, an originally nomadic people descended from the Jurchens, who ruled northern China as the Jin Dynasty in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The weakness of Ming imperial power in the later years of that dynasty permitted the Manchus to invade all of China from their home territory in the northeast and rule it, as a dynasty they named the Qing (“pure”), from its founding in 1644 until the early twentieth century. Two long-

lived and powerful Manchu emperors, each reigning for sixty years, were Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) and Qianlong (r. 1735–95). Both were enthusiastic and knowledgeable supporters of painters at their courts. Between their reigns, the Yongzheng emperor—who may have ascended the throne by illegitimate means—ruled for only twelve years, from 1723 until his death in 1735. Yongzheng had a depressing effect on his painting academy, discouraging the production of signed works by individual masters in favor of anonymous collaborative pictures, and several important artists seem to have left or been banished from it during his reign. A few of the artists who worked under him and Qianlong appear in the central section of this chapter, which deals with court paintings depicting the Manchu emperors and their consorts, or concubines. Before that, we will look at some of the Jiangnan city masters as representatives of the urban professional type. One who is known only from a literary source is Shi Pangzi (Fatty Shi), who came from Shaoxing in Zhejiang and was active in Yangzhou; his dates are unknown. According to the note on him in Yangzhou Huafang Lu, the late-eighteenthcentury account of the scenes and pleasures of Yangzhou, he first studied portraiture from a certain Jifu (unidentified) and was also good at painting meiren, “beautiful women.” He lived in the Small Qin-Huai, the pleasure quarter of the city, and the principal customers for his pictures were the women of the quarter themselves. His price per scroll, whether large or small, was thirty silver taels. They were called, appropriately, “Shi’s beauties.”1 None of his works seems to have survived. Why the women bought them, where they were displayed, whether they hung them in their own rooms or presented them to customers and patrons, the note does not tell us, nor do we have much direct information from other sources on these matters. A late-Ming courtesan-writer, Ma Shouzhen, includes self-portraits among the gifts that courtesans might send to their lovers, and portraits of them by professional masters may well have been used the same way.2 Some notion of how the women in Shi Pangzi’s paintings looked might perhaps be afforded by those in a surviving picture by another urban small master, Hua Xuan, which in modern times has borne the misleading title Eight Beauties of the Hibiscus Terrace but might better be titled Eight Beauties on the Balcony of a Brothel (figure 2.1). 3 This unusually large work—more than ten feet wide—was first published in 1914 in the catalog of the Shanghai dealer E. A. Strehlneek, and is now in an American private collection. Paintings of this kind, like Japanese ukiyo’e prints, seem to have been appreciated in that late period more by Westerners than by ­Chinese, and thus often passed into foreign collections. In Strehlneek’s time it was said to be a group portrait of the eight concubines of the Ming artist Tang Yin, but that, of course, is an example of the kind of misrepresentation these paintings commonly suffer. The women must be eight courtesans or prostitutes on the balcony of a brothel, smiling and gesturing to attract men in the street or courtyard below. The women’s gestures and the things they hold (flowers, a fan with butterflies, a ­Buddha’s-hand fruit) are coded invitations of a kind that were common in meiren

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2.1 Hua Xuan (active ca. 1736), Eight Beauties on the Balcony of a Brothel. Dated 1736. Large panel painting, ink and colors on silk, 330 x 32 cm. Private collection; courtesy Sotheby’s.

paintings meant for male viewing. The term goulan, “enticing from the balustrade,” is in fact a Chinese euphemism for prostitutes.4 Along with the signature of Hua Xuan, the Eight Beauties painting bears a cyclical date that corresponds to 1736 or 1796; the earlier date is more likely, since the closest resemblances in facial types are to the women in an erotic album by Xu Mei (see figure 2.3), who was active in the late Kangxi era, that is to say, the early decades of the eighteenth century. Xu Mei was from Suzhou, and Hua Xuan, according to the single source that contains a notice on him, was active in nearby Wuxi; it may be that these two works supply a first step toward defining a regional style in meiren paintings. The same source states that Hua Xuan was good at portraiture.5 That he is one of twenty-one recorded Qing-period painters with the relatively uncommon surname Hua who were active in Wuxi suggests that he may have belonged to a family workshop or lineage.6 Further research in local histories and other non-art sources will no doubt clarify regional and family groupings among the urban studio masters beyond what is attempted here. An artist named Yin Shi is the painter of a “woman waiting” picture, a subtype within the meiren category (figure 2.2). The woman is seen alone with a weiqi (go) board; she awaits the coming of her husband or lover. (A painting of this subject by Yu Zhiding, dated to 1697, will be considered later; see figure 5.18). A poetic couplet in upper right reads, “He promised to come but hasn’t come; midnight has passed— / Idly she plays with the go pieces, as the lamp flame gutters.” Yin Shi is not recorded, but appears to be a mid-eighteenth-century master of Yangzhou; the cyclical date on the painting probably corresponds to 1745, and he signs “Yin Shi from Hanjiang,” an old name for Yangzhou. Moreover, both his calligraphy and his painting style resemble closely the work of Yuan Jiang, who will be introduced below.

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STUDIO ARTISTS IN CITIES AND COURT

He may well have been an unrecorded member of the Yuan Jiang–Yuan Yao studio. Another specialist who was producing meiren pictures in mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou was Kang Tao (active 1727–55). He came originally from Hangzhou, but, judging from inscriptions declaring “done in my sojourning studio in Hanjiang [i.e., Yangzhou],” and the mention of him in Yangzhou Huafang Lu, he must have been one of the numerous artists attracted to that city by the richness of patronage. Unlike Hua Xuan, Yin Shi, and most of the other city artists of this type, he seldom made use of Western elements of style—in this and other aspects of his style resembling his more famous contemporary Hua Yan (1682–1756), another who moved between

2.2 Yin Shi (active ca. 1745), Woman Wait­ ing at Weiqi Board (detail). Dated 1745. Small hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 127.5 x 71.4 cm. The British Museum, London (1910.2.12). © The Trustees of The British Museum.

Hangzhou and Yangzhou. Though by no means as versatile as Hua, Kang could do, along with attractive meiren and imaginary portraits of famous beauties of the past, paintings of various subjects for auspicious and seasonal hanging, including Zhong Kui the legendary exorcist of demons, a popular subject for paintings intended to drive off evil spirits, and “praying for skill in needlework,” the theme specified by Wen Zhenheng, in his calendar quoted in the previous chapter, as proper for hanging on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.7 Painters Who Moved between Cities and Court

Although some painters working in the Qing Imperial Academy in Beijing were northerners, the majority of those whose place of origin can be identified were from the south, places in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui provinces.8 Their preponderance is reflected in the fact that under the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors, court artists were called “southern craftsmen” (nanjiang); it was only under the Qianlong emperor that this designation was changed to “painters” (huahuaren).9 And they mostly came from the Jiangnan cities—Suzhou and Yangzhou, but also Jiading, Nanjing, Changshu, Wuxi, Zhenjiang, and others. They did not, as conventional accounts have assumed, simply learn their art from their engagements with the Academy and take what they learned back to the cities; in large part they consti­ tuted the Academy, and brought to it their highly developed skills and urban repertories. Within the court they continued to perform essentially the function they had performed in the cities: supplying, in response to demand or commission, high-level representational paintings for particular occasions and uses. They might be recommended at court by some fellow townsman who was serving there as an official, and receive imperial invitations. Another route was through direct invitation by the emperor. Kangxi and Qianlong, during their long reigns, each made six southern tours, on which they visited the Jiangnan cities.10 An artist might take the opportunity to present an example of his best work to the emperor, who, if sufficiently impressed, would invite him to Beijing and give him a post in the Academy, perhaps to work on some specific project. An example is Jin Tingbiao (active from ca. 1750, died 1768) from Zhejiang, a painter and son of a painter, about whom Yang Boda writes, “Jin Tingbiao seized the opportunity of Qianlong’s southern tour [i.e., the second tour, 1751] to present a painting of arhats [Buddhist holy men] in the baimiao technique [“plain drawing” in line, without washes or color]. The emperor appreciated the painting and ordered Jin to enter the Ruyi Guan.”11 Jin Tingbiao served out his remaining years at the Academy, dying in Beijing. Other painters were sometimes sent home after a few months, having failed to please the emperor, or returned to their cities after completing particular projects. Among the Qianlong-period woodblock prints made by Suzhou artists using European perspective (see figures 3.1 and 3.2), some bear signatures or seals reading “former court painter.”12 Gu Jianlong was introduced in the previous chapter as an artist who came from Taicang in Jiangsu and was active in Suzhou, living in the pleasure district at the base of Tiger Hill just outside the city. Judging from extant works, Gu was a highly

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st u d i o art i sts i n c i t i e s a n d c o u rt

2.3 Xu Mei (active 1690–1722), Family Scene. Leaf from album of eight erotic scenes, ink and colors on silk, 41.9 x 72.4 cm. Collection of Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation, Switzerland.

versatile master, doing figural, historical, erotic, auspicious, and other kinds of pictures, as well as portraits. Sometime around 1662, Gu Jianlong received an appointment as a painting attendant (zhihou) in the Kangxi court.13 No organized court academy existed under Kangxi’s reign, and the practice of giving artists lifetime posts instead of engaging them only for particular projects seems to have begun only later. Gu also painted portraits of officials at court, and was reportedly engaged in the early years of the Qing by the famous literatus-official Qian Qianyi (1582–1664), then serving in Beijing, to copy an album of portraits of Ming emperors that had been painted by the famous portraitist Tseng Qing (with whom Gu may have studied) for the Nanjing court of the last pretender to the Ming throne, the prince of Fu.14 Gu served at court for about ten years, and then retired to live and work again in Suzhou. Another painter who moved between a great Jiangnan city and the Imperial Academy in Beijing is Xu Mei (active 1690–1722, died 1724), who was known first in Suzhou, apparently doing among other things erotic albums, at least one of which has survived (figure 2.3). Paintings bearing only the artist’s seals are sometimes open to suspicion of being studio productions. But in this case Xu Mei’s authorship is supported by similarities in the portrayal of the women to a safely signed work by him, representing a goddess dancing and scattering flowers, in the British Museum.15 Moreover, erotic albums normally went unsigned, at most bearing the

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artist’s seals. Extant erotic albums with what appear to be reliable seals of two of our studio masters, Gu Jianlong and Xu Mei, and another with seals of Leng Mei that, though probably later than his time, is a work of high quality, make it clear that this genre was among the high-level pictorial products that some artists of this type could offer to their clientele. Xu Mei was called to court to participate, along with thirteen other painters and various supervisors, in the production of the Wan­ shou Tu, a sixtieth-birthday painting for the Kangxi emperor, which was completed in the form of two long handscrolls in 1716.16 That he was still active in 1722 is shown by a handscroll painting from that year portraying Wang Shan, the eighth son of Wang Shimin, enjoying his collection of books and scrolls.17 Earlier, in 1692 and 1695, Xu Mei had collaborated with Wang Hui and others on albums of landscapes and flower pictures, and within the court had painted the birds in a large, undated collaborative picture of birds and fish with willows and blossoming peach trees.18 These works alone demonstrate amply the versatility expected of a painter of Xu Mei’s type. What the Manchu emperors and their advisers recognized in the artists they invited to court were their highly developed representational skills—some of them, as we have seen, were portraitists as well as figure painters and masters of architectural and other subjects. Their versatility suited them for participation in collaborative projects: making visual records of state occasions, portraying the emperor and his consorts and ministers, or simply producing highly finished decorative and auspicious pictures. These are exactly the skills that permitted the same artists, and others like them, to make their livings in the cities as studio masters working on commission for a general clientele, producing the sorts of paintings with which we are concerned. The basic requirement, both in urban studios and at court, was an effect of visual truthfulness in their styles, together with a highly specialized capacity to embody certain ideas and feelings (auspicious, congratulatory, sexually arousing) in the imagery of their paintings. These masters had to be as fluent in the signifying systems of the urban popular culture as the Orthodox landscapists, or the painters of blossoming plum branches in ink, needed to be in those of the elite literati culture. And both sets of technical, visual, and expressive skills could be transported to the imperial court and valued there, in different contexts and for different sorts of projects. The leading portraitist of the early Qing, Yu Zhiding, represents another notable and early example of artists’ mobility between the two worlds, Jiangnan city to court and back, and like Gu Jianlong played some part in the formation of the genres we are considering. After establishing his fame as a portraitist in Yangzhou in the 1660s and 1670s, he took advantage of the patronage network he had built up, which included men such as Wang Shizhen (1634–1711) who were prominent in imperial court circles, to move to Beijing in the early 1680s and pursue there his career as a versatile and highly accomplished painter, specializing in portraiture but not limited to it. Yu was not properly a court artist and worked chiefly for a private clientele of government officials, himself holding a minor office in the capital.19

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2.4 Yu Zhiding (1647–1710 or after), Searching for Blossoming Plum in the Western Suburbs (portrait of the Manchu official Dali). Dated 1709. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 129.8 x 66.3 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

But he also did some work on imperial order and lived for a brief time in Kangxi’s favorite retreat, the Changchun Yuan (Garden of Prolonging Spring).20 Back in the south from 1691 to the spring of 1696, he engaged in diverse projects such as designing maps and diagrams for a large-scale geographical compilation. He then returned to Beijing to pursue once more, with great success, portrait commissions from prominent officials. Many of these are extant; a good example is Searching for Blossoming Plum in the Western Suburbs (figure 2.4), which he painted in 1709. The person portrayed was a Manchu official named Dali. Yu Zhiding presents him as engaged in a highly conventionalized activity, beloved of poets: venturing out in

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late winter to search for the first blossoming plum as a harbinger of spring. To the poetic resonances of that theme, Yu adds a stylistic allusion: the landscape setting is painted in the manner of the twelfth-century court painter Ma Hezhi, who specialized in illustrations of poetry. With these layers of reference (and others), the picture can serve to exemplify a kind of painting that had special appeal to a literati elite, and to set it apart from most of the paintings discussed in this book. Another Yangzhou studio master who traveled to the north was Yuan Jiang (ca. 1670–ca. 1755). Since he specialized in landscapes with palaces and in garden pictures, he falls outside the proper scope of our investigation, but he deserves notice both in the present context and as a painter who made heavy use of Western illusionistic techniques, combining these with the Song academic tradition of landscape-with-palaces compositions. In the early 1720s he traveled to Beijing; one early source states that he served in the Imperial Academy during the Yongzheng era, and another that his appointment was in the “Outer Yangxin Palace Hall,” a workshop for artists set up in the great imperial garden named the Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness). But doubts have been raised about whether he ever received an appointment as a court painter: none of his extant paintings bears the word chen, “your subject,” preceding his signature, and his name does not appear in any palace archive, nor is any work by him recorded in the imperial catalog.21 The recent publication of a large number of unsigned and anonymous paintings done under the Yongzheng emperor, however—many of them featuring images of the emperor himself—would seem to offer a solution to the problem. This body of work appears to have comprised the major output of the Imperial Academy during Yongzheng’s reign. Yuan Jiang was probably one of the team of painters employed in the Outer Palace in the Yuanming Yuan, where (as will be discussed below) the Yongzheng emperor spent most of his time, to produce, mostly through collaborations, this huge body of nameless, stylistically homogeneous pictures. Many of them are elaborate architectural compositions with figures, exactly the genre in which Yuan was strongest.22 It is true that we cannot easily distinguish his individual hand among them, but neither can we detect in them the recognizable hand of any other court artist.23 All those who took part in this depressing project were willing, or forced, to submerge their artistic personalities to the will of a ruler who apparently wanted pictures with images of himself prominent in them, along with his ministers and servants, consorts and concubines, and who cared nothing for style. Yuan Jiang returned to Yangzhou in his later years, and seems to have been successful there. This late period of his activity, as well as that of his close follower (and family member, probably his nephew) Yuan Yao, overlaps the rise in popularity of the Eccentric Masters in Yangzhou. Once more, we can note that differences between the paintings of the two groups do not by any means represent simple distinctions of high versus low taste, as they are presented in conventional accounts, or between artists of originality and genius versus traditional ones who simply repeat old formulas. Absent the criterion of brushwork as personal handwriting and the attractions of accompanying calligraphy and poems, one might argue, to the

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contrary, that Yuan Jiang, the “academic” painter, is an artist of greater breadth and inventiveness than, say, Zheng Xie (Zheng Banqiao, 1693–1765), an Eccentric who painted bamboo and orchids in ink, in a quite repetitive output. What is really at stake is the difference in functions for which their paintings were intended, as well as the different clienteles whose tastes and desires they accommodated. A particularly fine example of Yuan Jiang’s painting, and one that will illustrate this observation, is his Palace at Evening, after Guo Zhongshu, painted in 1693, relatively early in his career (figure 2.5). As a highly accomplished work of poetic evocation, it approaches the level of Southern Song Academy painting, which it consciously echoes. A palace fronting on an imperial lake occupies the foreground, along with a huge, elegantly portrayed garden rock. Close-up details would reveal that the drawing, even in the architecture, is not simply neat and academic (as “ruledline drawing” was held to be), but lively, with small calligraphic quirks. Beyond the lake is a large courtyard and another palace building, which we are to understand as the residence of the emperor. The nearer palace is lit up inside, and servants appear in a doorway; something has roused them. What this is we learn only when we attend to a passage in the left distance, across the lake: disembarking from a boat is an imperial concubine with her attendants; she has been summoned in the middle of the night to the emperor’s bed. Pictures by the urban studio masters, as we will see, frequently prove to have narratives embedded in them; the critics’ scorn for stories-in-pictures is one of the factors that have worked against these ­artists. Li Shan (1686–ca. 1756), though not an artist of the type under consideration, exemplifies the back-and-forth pattern and the social and stylistic mobility it represents.24 Beginning as a would-be official in Jiangsu Province who learned the Orthodox landscape manner, Li submitted a poem to Kangxi on the emperor’s sixtieth birthday that won him an invitation to court, where he spent about ten years, probably as both secretary and Academy painter, learning the traditional style of flower-and-bird painting from a conservative master named Jiang Tingxi (1669– 1732). On the accession of the Yongzheng emperor in 1723, Li Shan returned south to Yangzhou. After the Qianlong emperor ascended the throne he again attempted an official career, serving for four years from 1738 in a post in Shandong Province. Dismissed from office, he returned to Yangzhou, where he became famous as a professional painter for his loose-brush, “untrammeled” works—in which he was able to retain, however, enough of the disciplines of his earlier training to make them satisfying as pictures. He was later numbered among the so-called Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou. Quite a number of other painters from the Jiangnan cities traveled north to the capital in search of patronage and perhaps a position in the Academy, but failed to receive the support they sought and returned disappointed. Besides Yuan Jiang, they include Shitao (1642–1707), Hua Yan, and Luo Ping (1733–99). Hua went to Beijing in 1717, was presented to the emperor, and was offered an official post. But as the position was too low, and his paintings seem not to have been popular there, he returned to Hangzhou. Luo Ping made three trips from his home in Yangzhou

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2.5 Yuan Jiang (ca. 1670–ca. 1755), Pal­ ace at Evening, after Guo Zhongshu. Dated 1693. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 153.7 x 66.3 cm. Oscar L. Tang Family, New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

to Beijing, where he received the support of high officials and literary men. But his friendships and patronage did not translate into financial success. In his old age he returned, a poor man, to Yangzhou.25 The Zhang Family, Yangzhou Beauties, and the Manchu Court

Among the urban small masters of Yangzhou who attained positions in the Imperial Academy, Zhang Zhen is of special interest. By piecing together scattered clues and paintings we can construct around him and his son and grandson a tentative picture of a family workshop, active both at court and outside, extending over at least three generations. Their case merits a more extended consideration, which will touch on themes—Chinese artists’ adoptions from European pictorial art, erotic implications of images of women—that will be more fully developed in later chapters. Seen in their art-historical context and sensitively read, the paintings cast new light on a large issue in Qing history: the ambivalent attitudes of the Manchu rulers toward Han Chinese culture generally, and in particular toward the popular and erotic culture of the Jiangnan cities.26 Zhang Zhen’s birth and death dates are unknown; he must have been active in the early decades of the eighteenth century, from the middle to late Kangxi era and perhaps into the Yongzheng. A painting of the meiren genre by him, bearing his signature and two of his seals, is one of his two known surviving works (figure 2.6).27 For the woman to be seen through a window is common enough, but the erotic invitation that such pictures customarily convey takes an uncommon form here: she holds, as if protectively, a female cat, which raises a forepaw and snarls daintily, its tail wrapped around its body; it is the object of concentrated attention from a male cat on a garden rock outside, its tail extended and perhaps swishing. The intent gaze of the tomcat nicely parallels the viewer’s assumed perusal of the woman as an object of desire. Zhang Zhen has no reputation today but was famous in his time, according to the single source that mentions him, for pictures of dogs and cats.28 Here, demonstrating the versatility and genre-crossing skills of the urban-professional masters, he has adapted his speciality to the popular meiren theme. It was just such skills that earned the best and most fortunate of the city painters invitations to court, and the notice on Zhang Zhen states that he served in the Imperial Academy, and that his son Zhang Weibang did also. This meiren painting, relatively simple in its imagery and less polished in execution than Academy painting was required to be, must represent the kind of work he produced in Yangzhou, presumably before entering service at court. There is also a record stating that the son, Zhang Weibang, who probably entered the Academy in the late Kangxi or early Yongzheng era, the early 1720s, was recruited as one of four artists who staffed a “painting studio of antiques” within the Yuanming Yuan from 1736, the year after Qianlong’s succession.29 Works are recorded on which he collaborated with Lang Shining (the Italian missionary-artist Giuseppe Castiglione), one of them as late as 1761. A collaborative work by Zhang Weibang and three other Academy masters represents palace ladies in summer enjoying the cool of a waterside pavilion and boat-

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ing on the lake (figure 2.7). It is not dated, but the strongly perspectival drawing of the buildings, and the portrayal of the palace women in the manner of Jiao Bingzhen (cf. figures 3.9 and 3.10), suggest a date late in the Kangxi reign. Castiglione had entered the Imperial Academy in 1715, and his example may lie behind the strong Westernizing elements seen here: the linear or vanishing-point perspective, visual access to shadowy interior spaces, and penetration to a farther room in the building at left. We have no way of knowing what part of the painting Zhang Wei­ bang was responsible for, but it might well have been the buildings, since jiehua (“ruled-line” rendering of architectural subjects) was another specialty of the father, Zhang Zhen, and Zhang Weibang would presumably have learned it from him. Although no written record associates Zhang Weibang (or his father) with the Yuanming Yuan before 1736, it is likely that both men were connected with it from the late Kangxi period. As evidence, there is a group of roughly datable paintings portraying women in what we might term the Zhang family style—presumably a variant of a Yangzhou local style—whose production can be firmly located in the Yuanming Yuan. That great imperial garden, located just outside the city wall to the west of the capital, was the Yongzheng emperor’s favorite retreat, built for him by his father in

2.6 Zhang Zhen (active early eighteenth century), Lady at Window, with Two Cats. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 145.4 x 63.5 cm. Private collection.

2.7 Zhang Weibang (active 1720s–60s) et al., Palace Ladies in a Waterside Pavil­ ion. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, dimensions unknown. Palace Museum, Shenyang.

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1709 while he was still Prince Yinzhen, and greatly enlarged and elaborated from 1723 when he ascended the throne. In that year Yongzheng set up an “outer branch” of the Painting Academy in the garden, to match the one located in the Yangxin Dian (Cultivating the Mind Hall) in the Forbidden City. 30 This division, along with other analogous divisions of court functions, reflected his intention to divide his time between the two places. Still later he would set up court within the garden and spend most of his time there. Sensitive to possible Confucian moralistic charges that his preference for the seclusion of the garden betrayed a secret pursuit of pleasure—the rules that governed the emperor’s sexual practices in the Forbidden City were reportedly relaxed in the Yuanming Yuan 31—he took every opportunity to proclaim his diligence in pursuing his administrative duties, and had a screen behind his desk displaying two large characters meaning “Don’t indulge in pleasure!”32 In what follows, however, we will suggest ways in which the paintings and their inscriptions, read in context, can serve to qualify such assertions and to suggest how both Yongzheng and his successor Qianlong deviated in their private behavior from the moral positions of their public proclamations. Recent scholarship on the Manchu rulers recognizes that while they projected images of themselves as Confucian monarchs in their dealings with the Han Chinese, they adopted different personae in dealing with the peoples and cultures of other parts of their huge empire, and remained somewhat aloof from all of them. 33 A large hanging scroll, about two meters in height (figure 2.8), depicts the Yongzheng emperor in his Garden of Perfect Brightness; this is one of the many unsigned and presumably collaborative works mentioned earlier as making up the bulk of the Academy production during his reign. It is an elaborate composition of the type called xingle tu, a term that literally means “picture of enjoying pleasure,” but was used specifically for portraits of people surrounded by the things that gave them pleasure—on the imperial level, xingle tu were in effect images of power and possession. The Yongzheng emperor is in the foreground of this one, seated inside a pavilion in the robe and hat of a scholar, looking up from a book to gaze out the window. One of his consorts is seen to the left with her servant, and three others on the veranda of another pavilion farther back, where they watch a boy and girl playing. Still farther back and across the stream are two cranes, and beyond this a moon door opens into another garden courtyard, where we glimpse lingzhi fungus growing in a pot on a garden table. Along with the profusion of longevity and other auspicious symbols, all the devices of the see-through composition (which will be discussed in the next chapter) are employed here to pull the beholder’s gaze far into the depths of the picture. Studied longer, the painting reveals subtler kinds of content. A white cat with black tail on the ground beneath the woman at lower left, watching what appear to be two mice, turns out to be itself watched by a ginger cat farther down toward the corner, partly hidden by the trunk of a pine. The motif is repeated in middleground beneath the three consorts: a white dog on the veranda to their right looks out through the lattice railing at another, which rears up on its hind legs in eagerness.

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2.8 Anonymous (possibly Zhang Zhen or Zhang Weibang, with others), The Yong­ zheng Emperor Enjoying Pleasures (Yong­ zheng xingle tu). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 206 x 101.6 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

These pairings, presumably to be read as desirous male with coquettish female (a pattern that may extend even to the cranes, if one reads their postures that way), constitute a subtheme of the picture and a commentary on the relationship of consorts and emperor—even though the latter sits alone and aloof, gazing at none of them, projecting an image of propriety. The pairings also echo the simpler, more blatant one of the two cats in Zhang Zhen’s meiren painting (figure 2.6), thus linking that picture and this one. A stronger link is supplied in the depiction of the women and their costumes. In the painting by Zhang Weibang and others (figure 2.7), the women (probably painted by one of the other artists) appear to belong to the conventional willowy, even bodiless type with simple ovoid heads that, as we will see in the next chapter, had been established somewhat earlier within the Academy by the northern artists Jiao Bingzhen (active ca. 1680–1726; see figures 3.9 and 3.10) and his follower Leng Mei (ca. 1670–1742 or after). The four women in the painting of Yongzheng Enjoying Pleasures are very different, more substantial, their bodies articulated, not merely smoothly supple. Their facial features are more broadly dispersed over their faces, whereas those on the women of the Jiao-Leng type are bunched up in the center, with tall foreheads above and long chins below. The eyes of Yongzheng’s consorts are placed higher on their faces and are more elongated, their mouths fuller. They seem more mature and real; beside them, the ladies of the Jiao-Leng type appear artificial and all but devoid of sensuality. When we observe exactly these features in the woman in Zhang Zhen’s painting (figure 2.6), we can speculate that the women in the Yongzheng Enjoying Pleasures painting are probably the work of Zhang or his son, or perhaps the two together. It is also possible to surmise that the Zhang family style for beautiful-women paintings, developed in Yangzhou (where it presumably followed a local tradition) and introduced into the court, had come to rival, and in some measure supplant, the older, northern manner practiced by Jiao Bingzhen and Leng Mei. The imagery of women is, in the term I will use later in discussing more overtly erotic pictures, heating up. The four women in this painting, moreover, are wearing neither the archaic garb (based loosely on Tang and Song dress) of traditional court-lady pictures, nor Manchu palace robes of the kind actually (or at least properly) worn by the Qing imperial and princely consorts. What they wear is the fashionable dress of upper-class Han Chinese women of the south. 34 It is possible that these are Chinese women—the Qing emperors and princes could select their secondary consorts, though not their principal wives or empresses, from among daughters of Han Chinese banner families (i.e., families that had been honored with that title for supporting the Manchus during the conquest) as well as from Manchu, Mongol, and other banner families. 35 The Kangxi emperor had Han Chinese consorts, and reportedly showed a marked preference for them during his later years; Yongzheng also had Chinese consorts, and they might be the women depicted in the painting. 36 But properly they should not be wearing the fashionable southern Chinese dress. In an attempt to preserve

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cultural purity, the Manchus had been forbidden, from the founding of the dynasty, to wear Han Chinese clothing, and the prohibition had been reinforced by successive imperial edicts. The Kangxi emperor had even posted an iron plaque at the entrance to the Forbidden City prohibiting women in Han attire from entering. 37 The painting raises, then, the question of whether it represents real practice— such dress-ups, even while officially prohibited, might well have taken place in the secluded precincts of the Yuanming Yuan—or a purely imagined situation. Arguing for the latter is a couplet in a poem by the Qianlong emperor himself, in which he says that the wearing of Han Chinese dress in the xingle tu pictures is “no more than a play within paintings—it is not that we admire the Han people’s costume.”38 Shan Guoqiang accepts Qianlong’s version of the matter, arguing that it was simply a question of aesthetics: “The conventions of the genre required that feminine beauty be accentuated, and that the painting be aesthetically pleasing. Because Manchu dress was excessively austere, it was not perceived as fulfilling the demands of a genre developed specifically to highlight feminine beauty. . . . It became the practice to clothe the female subjects in Han Chinese attire.”39 But the emperor’s couplet may also have been a disingenuous disclaimer intended to conceal his and his father’s indulgence in an officially forbidden practice. In either case, having himself depicted in the company of consorts in fashionable southern Chinese dress must have represented for the Yongzheng emperor the appropriation, through the imagery of paintings, of an ideal that—in theory, at least— was unobtainable even for an emperor and so all the more desirable: the caizi jia­ ren or “scholar-and-beauty” romance that was a pervasive theme in romantic fiction and drama from the late Ming onward. Wu Hung, citing stories about alleged liaisons between Manchu emperors and Jiangnan courtesans, comments that paintings of Chinese beauties done within the court “prove that Manchu lords may have encouraged [such stories] . . . or may even have invented a ‘love affair’ with Chinese beauties themselves.” 40 The idea is persuasive, especially in the light of Yong­ zheng’s penchant for adopting roles, of having himself portrayed in Western clothing or in Han Chinese costume, and especially his personal involvement during the late years of his father’s reign, while he was still Prince Yinzhen, in the production of the Twelve Beauties screen that we will consider next.41 Carrying out in reality the ideal of liaisons with Han Chinese beauties, on the other hand, might have involved some risk. Yongzheng’s main rival for the throne, Prince Yinreng, who had preceded him as the heir apparent, had been deposed by Kangxi in 1708 for, among other things, having engaged in debauchery, buying Chinese boys and girls for his sexual use when he traveled with his father to Suzhou and Yangzhou on Kangxi’s southern tours. In 1703 Kangxi had asked a trusted official in the south to compile a secret report on Yinreng’s activities; the report, when it came, proved much worse than the emperor had expected. Yinreng and a host of accomplices both Manchu and Chinese were continuing to enslave Chinese children for sexual purposes, embezzling state funds to pay for their pleasures.42 Kangxi es-

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pecially feared Yangzhou, not only for his sons but also for himself; he associated the city with the southern luxuries and temptations to licentiousness that had ensnared the sixth-century emperor Sui Yangdi. He writes revealingly, in a poem composed in 1705, “Sui Yangdi indulged himself in watching rare Yangzhou flowers—I pity him with a long sigh . . .  / Oh, that I would not let [my heart] be driven to follow my lusts and my craving for extravagance.” 43 There was a background to the emperor’s fears: in 1655, during the reign of his father, Shunzhi, an official named Ji Kaisheng had submitted a memorial criticizing “an expedition to Yangzhou to buy Chinese women for the palace” on the grounds that Yangzhou had the “bandit spirit”—it had been a center of powerful resistance to the Manchus during their conquest—and that there would be “adverse public reaction to such activities.” 44 Although Shunzhi denied indignantly that anything of the kind was taking place, we can assume that it must have been, since Ji Kaisheng, who was punished for his memorial, would scarcely have taken the risk of admonishing against imagined impropriety in the court. Altogether, the scattered evidence suggests a certain ambivalence and laxity within the palace with respect to the officially promulgated policy against consorting with Han Chinese women or adopting Han Chinese dress. The meiren type introduced to court by Zhang Zhen and his son must have carried, for the northern rulers, some aura of this highly seductive, if perilous, Yangzhou decadence. The other paintings that appear to connect the Zhang family style with Yongzheng and the Yuanming Yuan are a set of twelve large hanging scrolls, once believed to be portraits of Yongzheng’s twelve consorts, of which two are reproduced here (figures 2.9 and 2.10). They are about the same size—two meters high by one meter wide—as the xingle tu painting just considered, and belong, like that one, to the large-scale production of unsigned, collectively produced paintings apparently favored by Yongzheng. Signed inscriptions and seals “represented” in the paintings—actually inscribed and impressed on them, but as if on scrolls and screens within the pictures—bear names used by Yongzheng while he was still a prince, identifying him as the writer; these date the paintings to the period between 1709, when the garden was presented to Yongzheng by his father, and 1723, when he ascended the throne; they probably belong late in that period. And close correspondences in the drawing of some features—architecture, furniture, plants, most of all the women themselves—suggest strongly that Zhang Zhen or Zhang Weibang, or most likely both, were involved in the production of these works. One of the twelve even portrays a woman seen through a moon window looking down at a pair of amorous cats (figure 2.10), close stylistic relatives of the felines in the meiren picture by Zhang Zhen (figure 2.6). The real nature and original placement of the pictures were clarified in 1986 when a record was discovered of the remounting of the paintings in 1732. According to this record, the twelve paintings—which are designated in the doc­ ument as “silk paintings of meiren,” and so are clearly not portraits at all—had originally been mounted on a “surrounding screen” (weiping) in a building that was Yongzheng’s favorite haunt within the Yuanming Yuan, called the Shenliu

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Dushu Tang (Study Deep within Willows). Yongzheng ordered that the paintings be rolled on specially made wooden rollers for preservation. Screens of the weiping type still stand in the restored rooms of the Forbidden City, used to enclose a throne or couch.45 One should imagine Yongzheng sitting or reclining, then, almost surrounded by life-size, illusionistically rendered images of southern Chinese beauties in sumptuous interiors, stimulated by the illicit, drawn to what was properly beyond real access even for the emperor of China. Considered in this light, the Twelve Beau­ ties paintings, with their strikingly accessible spaces and realistic renderings of surfaces, their multiplying of the meiren image by twelve and their placement so as to surround the emperor and occupy most of his field of vision, must have been as close to a virtual-reality production as eighteenth-century China could achieve. The engagement of the Zhang family with the Manchu court did not end with Zhang Weibang; his son Zhang Tingyan, Zhang Zhen’s grandson, who is listed in Qing sources as a specialist in the painting of figures and architectural subjects, also served in the Imperial Painting Academy under the Qianlong emperor, from 1744 at least until 1768.46 The biographical notice lists him as a native of Yangzhou, which might simply designate family origin, but it is also possible that he was born there, and was perhaps even active there for some part of his life. One can imagine members of Zhang family moving back and forth, over several decades, between

2.9 Anonymous (possibly Zhang Zhen or Zhang Weibang, with others), panel from the screen Twelve Beauties in Palace Interiors (formerly mistakenly titled Twelve Consorts of the Yong­ zheng Emperor). Ink and colors on silk, each 184 x 98 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

2.10 Anonymous (possibly Zhang Zhen or Zhang Weibang, with others), another panel from the same screen as figure 2.9.

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two great centers, political and economic, working for patrons ranging from welloff burghers in Yangzhou to the emperor himself in Beijing. A number of signed works by the two younger Zhangs, Weibang and Tingyan, are to be seen in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, and the Palace Museum, Beijing, but these mostly belong to the more familiar categories of Academy painting and are beyond our subject.47 Among those by Zhang Tingyan, however, is another xingle tu, this one celebrating the Qianlong emperor’s omnipotence by portraying him looking out from a room in his private quarters over the courtyards of the palace, his world, which stands for the entire world—the apogee of the proprietary gaze.48 Here, the object of the imperial gaze is not specific, since no one is seen in the gardens except servants tending flowers or carrying a qin. But in a compositionally similar xingle tu by Jin Tingbiao, Zhang’s contemporary in the Academy, the meaning is unambiguous. (Both Zhang Tingyan’s picture and Jin Tingbiao’s are signed: the practice of Academy artists signing their works was restored upon Qianlong’s succession.) Jin Tingbiao, Lang Shining, Jin Tingbiao’s xingle tu (figure 2.11), like Zhang Tingyan’s, locates Qianlong in the and Denis Attiret: Pictures of upper left corner and allows him to command visually the remainder of the picture Qianlong and His Consorts space, in which are arranged the beauteous objects of his gaze. In the painting of Yongzheng Enjoying Pleasures (figure 2.8), by contrast, the emperor looks not at his consorts but at lotuses, creating a more dispersed, relaxed composition. The objects of concentrated imperial attention in Jin Tingbiao’s painting are three stately women who, with their servants and attendants, make up a procession that emerges from a ravine at upper right and continues across the picture space, with the women standing on a bridge at the center. Like the consorts in Yongzheng’s xingle tu, they wear Han Chinese costumes—the couplet quoted earlier in which Qianlong tries to dismiss this feature as no more than “a play within paintings” is in fact from his inscription on this picture. His disclaimer is in accord with his own official policy. Evelyn Rawski writes, “The early Manchu laxity toward ‘ethnic purity’ was replaced in the mid-eighteenth century by a heightened concern with the maintenance of Manchu separateness. . . . The Qianlong Emperor desired that ‘there should be orderly congruence of race to custom.’ ” This tightening of regulations responded to “clear signs . . . of the loss of Manchu language skills among bannermen and indications that Manchu dress and other customs were being supplanted by Chinese norms. . . . The concern with the preservation of Manchu ethnicity voiced by the Qianlong Emperor . . . undoubtedly helped to perpetuate the prohibition against intermarriage with Han Chinese.” 49 But once more we may suspect that, at least at the imperial level and within the Yuanming Yuan, official policy gave way before the appeal of Han, or at least Han-attired, beauties. Qianlong’s feelings about the Jiangnan culture were as ambivalent as Kangxi’s and Yongzheng’s; he was, as Philip Kuhn puts it, “both attracted and repelled.” Anecdotal accounts tell of him roaming the cities in commoner’s clothes while on his southern tours, frequenting

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brothels and having affairs with courtesans. But Qianlong also, like his predecessors, recognized that Jiangnan represented, as Kuhn writes, “decadence and assimilation. Its decadent culture ruined good officials who served there, whether bannermen or ordinary Han.”50 Qianlong was as devoted as Yongzheng had been to the pleasures of life in the Yuanming Yuan. Denis Attiret (1702–68), another Jesuit missionary-painter who served under him there and in the palace from his arrival at court in 1738, is especially informative on this matter. What follows are excerpts from a letter he wrote in 1743 to a friend in Paris:

2.11 Jin Tingbiao (active from ca. 1750, died 1768), perhaps with Lang Shining, The Qianlong Emperor Enjoying Himself. Horizontal painting, ink and colors on silk, 167.4 x 320 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

The Emperor usually resides here Ten Months in each Year. We are about Ten Miles from Pekin. All the Day, we are in the Gardens. . . . The part in which the Emperor usually resides here, with the Empress, his favourite Mistresses, and the Eunuchs that attend them [he attempts in a note to render the Chinese names for several of the “different Titles of Honour, for the different Classes of such of the Emperor’s Mistresses, as are most in his Favour”] is a vast Collection of Buildings, Courts, and Gardens. . . . ’Tis a sort of Seraglio; in the different Apartments of which you see all the most beautiful things that can be imagin’d, as to Furniture, Ornaments, and Paintings. . . . There is but one Man here; and that is the Emperor. All Pleasures are made for him alone. This charming Place is scarce ever seen by any body but himself, his Women, and his Eunuchs [and also, Attiret notes with some pride], the Clock-makers and Painters, whose Employments made it necessary that they should be admitted every where. 51

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Attiret was one of the Jesuit fathers charged with designing and furnishing the European pavilions within the Yuanming Yuan, a project conceived by Qianlong and carried out from 1747. That he himself took part in furnishing some of the apartments of the emperor’s “seraglio” with appropriate wall paintings is attested also by two surviving drawings by him, identified in their Chinese labels as sketches for pictures to be executed on the west and east walls of the “east chamber” of a building called the Chengguan Ge, unidentified but assumably one of these buildings (figures 2.12 and 2.13). An accompanying written note (in French) reads, “Drawings by Brother Attiret. They are only sketches. It is thus that our artists present them to the emperor. If he approves them, they paint them.” The drawings were apparently sent by some Jesuit missionary in China to an acquaintance in Paris, and entered the Bibliothèque Nationale there in 1890.52 Even without these accompanying documents the pictures would be recognizable as sketches for large paintings: compositions of this type, offering a view (and imagined entry) into a further room behind a curtain or other marker of the picture plane, are unknown in small self-standing pictures but can be seen in many life-size illusionistic paintings, both murals and large hanging scrolls, of the kind we are considering. Several of the Twelve Beauties pictures (e.g., figures 2.9 and 2.10) take

2.12 Denis Attiret (1702–68), Woman Lifting a Curtain to Look out from a Room. Drawing, black chalk on paper, 19.7 cm. x 9.9 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

2.13 Denis Attiret, Woman Seated at a Table Writing. Drawing, black chalk on paper, 19.7 cm. x 9.9 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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this form, as do works by Leng Mei (see figure 3.13) and Jin Tingbiao (see figure 2.17). What is probably the earliest datable Chinese example, from 1697, is by Yu Zhiding (see figure 5.18).53 The women in Attiret’s sketches wear Han Chinese gowns and appear to have Chinese faces, as rendered by the foreign artist. One of them lifts the curtain with one hand while concealing the other in her sleeve, which opens toward the viewer, a subtly erotic invitation (cf. figure 5.5 and the discussion of that picture); two barrel seats are visible behind her. The other sits writing at a table, looking out with brush lifted, her attention attracted by the visitor/viewer; an open round window beyond is crossed by a bamboo lattice. Both women are delectably youthful and winsome, offering the European master’s best judgment of what type would most entice his imperial patron. In imagining how splendid the completed paintings must have been, we can lament once more the reduction of the ­Yuanming Yuan to the stone ruins surviving today, through the looting and burning carried out by Anglo-French forces in 1860 and again in 1900 by foreign invading troops putting down the Boxer Rebellion. In Jin Tingbiao’s Qianlong xingle painting (figure 2.11), to return to that, the meaning of focusing the imperial gaze on the women is unsubtly underscored by the presence of two deer in lower left, the stag turning its head and tossing its antlers while looking pointedly at the doe from the rear. Compositionally, the pair of animals counters with a shorter diagonal the principal one that stretches tensely between Qianlong and his consorts. What was a subtheme in the Yongzheng painting, with its pairings of cats, dogs, and cranes, is the central theme here—as it had been, of course, in Zhang Zhen’s meiren painting with the tomcat and its pussy love. Both urban and Imperial Academy paintings of this genre carried thinly encoded messages, which the people who purchased, commissioned, or commanded them wanted to receive, about the wealth and possessions they had acquired or aspired to, about the intensely desirable women who longed for their coming, and about their power to appropriate and possess all these, from opulent furnishings to glamorous concubines. Nie Chongzheng, in a note on Jin Tingbiao’s xingle tu, surmises that whereas Jin was responsible for most of the picture, and only his signature appears on it, the portrait heads of several of the figures and the portrayal of the deer betray the hand of a foreign artist, probably Lang Shining (Castiglione). 54 Another extant painting of a stag and doe by Castiglione, this time working alone, which also reportedly came from the Yuanming Yuan, reinforces both Nie’s conjecture about authorship and ours about the implications of the image (figure 2.14). The stag and doe are here represented standing on two banks of a stream, the stag in the open, legs spread and head turned, the doe partly concealed, as if for modesty, in autumn bushes, appearing coyly to return the stag’s gaze. An inscription on the painting by the Qianlong emperor claims for it a classical theme, the “Lu Ming” (Deer Cry) poem in the Shijing (Book of Odes).55 But here again the emperor is diverting attention from what the painting is really about—which is, once again, the stag’s intent visual apprehension of the doe, with its unmistakable implication of imminent

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2.14 Lang Shining (Giuseppe Castiglione, 1688–1766), Stag and Doe in an Au­ tumn Forest. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 72.1 x 30.8 cm. From Sotheby’s auction catalog, New York, November 29, 1993, no. 79.

physical possession. Here, then, is still another relic of the intricate and nominally illicit stag-and-doe, Manchu-and-Han, sex-and-power games that must have been played in the Yuanming Yuan—in pictures, imagination, and actuality—by the Manchu emperors and their consorts and concubines. We began with cats and end with deer, and the change can be seen as corresponding to the move from an urban setting to the emperor’s court. The erotic imagery of paired cats, perhaps introduced into the court from Yangzhou by Zhang Zhen, was relatively low-key, only hinting at the intense ardor of real feline couplings. That of the antlered stag and doe, by contrast, because of the more commanding size and bearing of the stag and the blatant phallicism of its antlers, intensified the eroticism and added to the open dominance implied in the relationship of masterful male to submissive female. The antlered stag had symbolized in nomadic culture, at least since its representation by Liao or Khitan artists in the eleventh century, the power and majesty of the ruler, who was the only one permitted to hunt the animal. The custom of holding imperial deer hunts in autumn was carried on under the Jurchens and also under their descendants the Manchus, especially by the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors. 56 The Manchu rulers, from early in the dynasty, had ordered “antler chairs,” aggressively bristling with pointed branches, made for their use as expressions of ethnic identity.57 Although deer were regularly included as auspicious symbols of the emoluments of rank in Chinese birthday pictures, no Qing-period artist outside the court working for a private clientele painted deer in this context and with this significance, paired stags and does in attitudes that hinted at coupling. In any case, to represent sexual encounters through paired animals, whether cats or deer, is to reduce sexual union to an act of sheer brute possession. The Manchu-Han relationship under the Qing could itself be regarded as gendered, with the militant northerners having invaded and overcome the softer, gentler south, a relationship of rape that long before Qianlong’s time had been publicly transformed by the Manchus, with some success, into a role of benevolent husbanding. And the most extreme playing out of that rape had happened, as both sides remembered well, in Yangzhou—the terrible Ten Days’ Massacre of May 1645.58 Supposing our readings of the paintings and other indications to be right, did any faint sense of replaying that most brutal of cross-cultural encounters resonate in the minds of the Manchu rulers as they sported with Yangzhou or Yangzhou-costumed beauties in amatory activities of a kind aptly pictorialized in paired animals? And what of the three Zhangs, along with Jin Tingbiao, another southerner who had begun as a figure painter near Wuxing in Zhejiang—not to speak of the Italian Jesuit Castiglione, insofar as he understood the implications of what he was called upon to paint—what could they have felt about their function of supplying images and inspiration for these sex-and-power games? Questions without answers; but the paintings and their contexts allow what might be termed educated imaginings. Another probable collaboration between Jin Tingbiao and Castiglione, presenting essentially the same theme in a way at once tamer and more explicit, is a pair of

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2.15 and 2.16 Jin Tingbiao, possibly with Lang Shining, The Qianlong Emperor and a Consort. Pair of hanging scrolls, ink and colors on silk, each 63 x 100.2 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

large, unsigned paintings that may originally have been mounted as panels on a wall, representing Qianlong and one of his consorts (figures 2.15 and 2.16). Informal portraits of Qianlong like this one typically cast him in some established, flattering role, and this is no exception: the two are playing at the caizi jiaren (“talented scholar and beauty”) pairing, with him as the scholar pausing in the midst of his literary composition to admire his lovely companion. Artists as well as patron may have taken their inspiration from some exemplary scholar-beauty couple such as Qian Qianyi (1582–1664) and his poet-consort Liu Yin or Liu Rushi (1618–64). The woman is a generic beauty, her facial features, clothing, and whole demeanor following, with only minor updating, the Yangzhou or southern type introduced by Zhang Zhen. She gazes into a mirror and adorns her hair with ornate hairpins, to which will be added later the white orchids and what appear to be red carnations in a bowl before her. She is preparing to receive the royal visit. Qianlong, brush in hand and paper spread before him, gazes contemplatively sideward toward her, through a window into the room where she is; her slight smile and raised brows suggest that she is aware of being watched. Behind the emperor, seen through another window, is a blossoming plum tree; behind her is a lotus pond. With consummate skill and subtlety the (putative) two artists have realized in pictorial images the romantic ideal—which, as suggested earlier, was presumably being pursued in actuality as well—of their imperial patron, who was meanwhile asserting that the Han Chinese dress worn by the women in such pictures was no more than “a play within paintings,” an aesthetic choice made by the artists. It is no accident that the paintings are unsigned, like the Yongzheng Enjoying Pleasures and the Twelve Beauties paintings (figures 2.8–10). Unlike many other court paintings that are works of art for semipublic display, designed to carry moral and political messages, these were evocative—and provocative—images for private

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pleasure, visual embodiments of ideal narratives, which presumably played their role in creating controlled ambiences in secluded regions of the palaces. All these pictures, large in size, are done in polished, illusionistic styles that suppress the hands and personalities of the artists and avoid any surface distractions—inscriptions, conspicuous seals—that would interfere with direct apprehension of the image as a kind of quasi-reality beyond the picture surface. They call forth viewer responses that partake less of the aesthetic and intellectual, more of the vicarious and empathic. Another of this type by Jin Tingbiao is his Lady Putting Flowers in Her Hair, a large hanging scroll (more than 2.2 meters tall) on which the artist has written his signature very small, all but invisible, in the lower left corner (figure 2.17). The woman, like Qianlong’s consort in the paired paintings but slimmer and slit-eyed, is preparing herself to receive her lover, arranging orchids in her hair. Her surround­ ings, like those of the women in Yongzheng’s Twelve Beauties series, are richly appointed, but appear to be less a palace chamber than the boudoir of a concubine in a prosperous household. Like those pictures, this one too serves the imperial fantasy of taking the male lead in a scholar-beauty romance of the kind that had been best realized a century earlier in the Jiangnan cities, and now could be only distantly evoked. Its spatial intricacy makes the composition more visually absorbing than any of the Twelve Beauties series. From the frontal area in which the woman stands we are drawn back into the space of the bed behind her, and, zigzagging, to a corner of the room where a maid arranges books and scrolls, rightward to a table on which antiques are displayed, behind that to an alcove where a landscape painting hangs (providing its own illusion of farther space), and finally through a window into a garden where stalks of tall bamboo funnel the most distant space without closing it off, to indicate the possibility of still deeper penetration. It is worth noting once more that all these features of the painting, and the style in which it is done, were adopted to serve the special purposes of the meiren genre, and are not general to figure painting. When the same artist depicted a woman as protagonist of a Confucian moralizing scene instead of an implicitly erotic one, as for instance in his painting of Lady Feng Confronting the Bear (portraying a woman of the Western Han period who saved the emperor Yuandi [r. 48–32 b.c.e.] by interposing herself between him and a bear that had escaped from the imperial zoo), he employed a thoroughly traditional manner, devoid of illusionistic spaces or other visual enticements (figure 2.18). The Lady Feng painting, moreover, is modest in size and executed in the high-art medium of ink and light colors on paper, and is heavily furnished with imperial inscription and seals. The other (figure 2.17), by contrast, is large enough to be read like a doorway into a space occupied by life-size people and objects portrayed in a real-life mode; the ornate transom over the doorway, which marks the picture plane, and the angled railing that extends into our space at lower left encourage that reading. These distinctions are not simply ­matters of style; they set apart fundamentally different kinds of painting, which were experienced and valued differently by their viewers. Similar distinctions were made in

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2.17 Jin Tingbiao, Lady Putting Flowers in Her Hair. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 222.7 x 30.7 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

2.18 Jin Tingbiao, Lady Feng Confronting the Bear. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 149.4 x 75.2 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

the introductory chapter, and others will be made throughout this book, which would have no focus or purpose without a clear recognition of their importance. Jin Tingbiao, as noted earlier, was a southerner, from Zhejiang, and doubtless brought a repertory of local styles and imagery with him, along with some mastery of the genres popular in the Jiangnan cities, when he was invited to the court. But he also took part in the refinements of pictorial illusionism that were being accomplished within the Academy, through collaborations with Castiglione and others, and so was able to combine southern and northern achievements to create a particular kind of meiren painting that doubly enhanced the provocative impact of beautiful-woman pictures: by charging them with the lure of the perilous south, and by presenting the illusionistic styles in polished Academy renderings, thus maximizing their visual impact. Such a fusion, begun already in the paintings associated with Zhang Zhen and his son, is fully realized by Jin Tingbiao. Looking back over the foregoing and also ahead into later chapters, we can perceive a pattern—one that emerged rather unexpectedly in the course of this research and writing project. One reason the Manchu emperors brought artists to their court from the Jiangnan cities, it would appear, was that those artists’ repertories and visual expertise included vivid pictorializations of the Jiangnan/Yangzhou erotic culture, which held a powerful allure for the Manchu emperors. In the 1660s, as we will see in a later chapter, Kangxi engages the Suzhou master Gu Jianlong (who presumably had already acquired a reputation for erotic paintings) as a portraitist but also to produce, if my attribution by style is correct, a series of illustrations for the great late Ming erotic novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Later, in the 1680s, he has Yu Zhiding, a well-established figure master from Yangzhou who did meiren pictures among other types (see figures 5.16 and 5.18), living at his Changchun Yuan, which had been designed specifically to reproduce the style of Jiangnan gardens. Did Yu Zhiding take part in creating an ambience within which sexual games of the kind suggested above could be played out? Kangxi (or his representative) also invites Zhang Zhen to court, and Zhang and his son continue to work under Yongzheng, who seems to have favored them, since paintings of him in various settings appear to betray their figure style. Zhang Weibang, at the beginning of Qianlong’s reign and very probably earlier as well, is engaged in the outer branch of the Academy located in the Yuanming Yuan, where he and others (perhaps including his father) create among other works the surrounding screen made for Yongzheng’s favorite retreat, the Shenliu Dushu Tang. Qian­long, we can surmise, similarly favors Jin Tingbiao, who was from Zhejiang and whose paintings discussed above may have been made for Qianlong’s private enclave (his seraglio, as Attiret calls it) within the Yuanming Yuan. Also, some unidentified artist active in Qianlong’s court produces a splendid part-erotic album for the enjoyment of the emperor, whose collector’s seals are on one leaf (as they are on additional leaves in Gu Jianlong’s Jin Ping Mei albums, indicating that these were passed down by the Qing emperors).59 A hitherto unsuspected chapter in the history of Manchu-Han relations opens up, and will be developed further as we proceed.

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Northern Figure Masters in and out of the Academy

The dominant figure painters active in the court in the late Kangxi era, the established masters with whom Zhang Zhen and his son doubtless had to compete, were Jiao Bingzhen and his leading followers Leng Mei and Chen Mei (active 1700s–40s), all of whom will receive more attention in the following chapters.60 Jiao and Leng were both from the northeastern province of Shandong, and must have brought with them to court some elements of a northern tradition of figure painting. Central to the formation of that tradition, we can surmise, was the late Ming figure master Cui Zizhong (1590s–1644), who came from Shandong and was active in his late years in Beijing. That likelihood will be discussed in the next chapter. Chen Mei was from the south, Songjiang in Jiangsu province, but became a pupil of Jiao Bingzhen, presumably after he came to court. Leng entered the Academy about 1690, Chen in the mid-1720s. All three worked for private clients outside the Academy at some time during their careers, and so fit our “in and out” pattern. Jiao Bingzhen, in addition to his productions for the Academy (see figures 3.9 and 3.10), made for clients outside it such works as a meiren painting to be considered in the next chapter (see figure 3.19) and a picture of the Han general Su Wu, prisoner of the Xiongnu (Huns) in the far north, longingly watching geese flying south to China (figure 2.19). Su Wu, after enemies at court had prevented reinforcements reaching him, had been defeated in battle by the Xiongnu. They offered their respected prisoner a command in their army, but on his refusal to switch allegiance consigned him to herding flocks in the harsh northland. The subject had always carried a poignant political message, and whoever commissioned the painting probably intended to present it to someone else to convey the virtue of political loyalty under adverse circumstances. Leng Mei, likewise for an outside client, painted the Daoist immortal Magu with fungus, peaches of immortality, and deer, all symbols of longevity apt for presentation on a birthday, particularly that of a woman (figure 2.20).61 Both artists represented within and outside the Academy the combining of a conservative, academic Chinese mode of painting with elements of European illusionism to produce a hybrid style that can be plainly seen in these two works. Some Western-derived elements, such as the deep recesses of Su Wu’s cloak or the awkwardly foreshortened face of Magu’s attendant, must still have struck Chinese viewers as foreign to their tradition, but both pictures demonstrate also how the borrowings were being absorbed into the contexts of traditional pictorial compositions designed to serve the quintessentially Chinese system of social observances and communal values. Leng Mei, especially his thirteen-year period of absence from the Imperial Academy (1723–35), is particularly instructive as a case study of the interaction of court and city painters, and the production of paintings by court artists and their studios outside the court. Recent writings by Yang Boda and Nie Chongzheng have brought this lost period to our attention and suggested an explanation for it.62 Leng had come into the Academy about 1690, and between then and 1723 had produced a number of dated or datable paintings and taken part in collaborative projects such as the huge pair of handscrolls prepared for the Kangxi emperor’s sixtieth birthday

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2.19 Jiao Bingzhen (active ca. 1680–1726), Su Wu Gazing at Geese. Small hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 43.2 x 57.8 cm. Formerly Contag collection, later C. C. Wang; present whereabouts unknown.

2.20 Leng Mei (ca. 1670–1742 or after), The Immortal Magu and Attendant. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 142 x 93.8 cm. Cho ¯ kaido ¯ Art Museum, Yokkaichi, Japan.

b­ etween 1713 and 1717.63 Sometime late in the Kangxi era he painted an album of moralizing Confucian subjects titled Yangzheng Tu (Preservation of Righteousness Pictures), probably for the instruction of one of Kangxi’s sons who was favored to succeed to the throne.64 But another son, Yinzhen, seized the throne by force on Kangxi’s death and declared himself the Yongzheng emperor, imprisoning or executing the rival imperial princes and purging the court of their supporters.65 Leng Mei, through his association with one of the other princes, may have been one of those banished. Additional factors that can be suggested for his leaving court service, supposing it to have been in some part voluntary, may have been the supplanting of his and his teacher’s figure style in imperial favor by that of the artists from Yangzhou, and the prospect of having to take part in the huge anonymous and collective projects that seem to have dominated court painting during Yongzheng’s reign. Whatever the cause, there is no record that Leng Mei did any work at court during the thirteen years of the Yongzheng era, nor, in any painting dated to those years, does his signature include the word chen (your subject), which would indicate that it was a court production. Moreover, the paintings on which Leng Mei himself wrote dates are all from these years outside the Academy. There is evidence, however, that he painted during this time for Yongzheng’s fourth son Hongli, who succeeded to the throne as the Qianlong emperor on Yongzheng’s death in 1735.66 Leng Mei was reinstated at court in that year, and began again to produce signed works for the court—no less than eight in 1736 alone.67 He served with high honors until he retired from the Academy in 1742. How much longer he lived is not known. A similar but more complex pattern can be pieced together from scattered evidence for Chen Mei, whose dated works done outside the Academy (identified as such by their subjects and styles, as well as by his method of signing them) also fall within the Yongzheng era. He had come to Beijing from his hometown, Songjiang in Jiangsu, in 1722 with his brother Chen Tong. In 1726 he was brought to court in the position of vice director of the Imperial Household Department; in that year he painted for the emperor, and signed, a Landscape with Bats (symbolizing good fortune, and done for the emperor’s birthday).68 According to one source, he was “granted a leave of absence from the court” at some time “so that he could return home to marry.”69 Like Leng Mei, he also worked outside the court during this period, doing landscapes with figures in a quite different style; dates on these range from 1728 to 1733. But he was also one of a team of five artists reportedly engaged from 1728 on another large collaborative project within the court, the Qingming Shanghe Tu (Spring Festival on the River) handscroll, an updated version of the famous Song-period work, which was completed—and signed with their names—in 1735, after the succession of Qianlong.70 The resolution of this seeming conflict awaits further research; it may be that Chen was somehow permitted to work outside the court while engaged in the Qingming project. His paintings produced within the Qianlong Academy after that include an album finished in 1738 (see figures 3.15 and 3.16), and works both collaborative and individual from the 1740s.

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One source reports that in 1740 he returned to his home in Songjiang after injuring his eye. He moved to Hangzhou during his last years, and died in 1745.71 That his older brother Chen Heng and younger brother Chen Tong were also painters suggests a family studio.72 Chen Mei’s works done outside the Academy are handsome and original landscapes with figures, of which an especially fine example is in the Freer Gallery of Art (figure 2.21).73 In these paintings, presumably made for a broader clientele, Western-inspired illusionistic techniques are employed to enhance the striking realism of the tangled trees, the matted ground vegetation, the readable space, the substantiality of the portraitlike figures, and to impart to these a depth and presence. That Chen Mei drew on foreign techniques (“methods from the Western Seas”) in his landscape paintings was noted already, with apparent approval, by Hu Jing, cataloguer of the imperial collection, in his 1816 Guochao Yuanhua Lu (Record of Academy Painting in Our Dynasty).74 Chen Mei’s painting in fact exemplifies, like many of the meiren and other paintings we will see, a strikingly successful integration of foreign elements into what reads as a unified style, relatively free of the alien character of a transplant. The partially Europeanized hybrid style in the hands of Jiao Bingzhen and Leng Mei must still have carried for Chinese viewers a distinct exoticism, whereas in Chen Mei’s best work the foreign-derived elements of illusionism have been so thoroughly accommodated to the Chinese tradition that they can pass virtually unnoticed, unless one is especially watching for them. The Freer painting is unsigned, and was offered by a New York dealer in the 1950s with an attribution to an unknown master of the Song period. It was acquired for the gallery on the urging of the present writer while he was a curator there, but not until he could satisfy then-director John Pope by identifying its real authorship, through finding comparable Chen Mei works with signatures.75 Such is the tyranny of names in the world of art. The question of Leng Mei’s activity as a painter during his years away from the Academy is of particular concern here, since some of his works that can be provisionally assigned to those years—done presumably for patrons outside the imperial court—fall into the genres under investigation: meiren pictures, works to be hung for occasions such as New Year’s and other family gatherings, birthday presentation pictures. A few of them will be introduced in later chapters (see, e.g., figures 4.12 and 4.13). The abundance of his output during this period, judging from the number that have survived and the shallow and sentimental character of many of them, leads to the assumption that he employed a studio assistant or assistants in this kind of production. A Leng Mei painting of 1724 representing a beautiful woman standing beside a table (see figure 5.20) is one his better works in the meiren genre; the close similarity between this and a signed but undated work (see figure 3.13) allows a provisional dating of the latter to about the same time. Paintings by him representing other subject categories include a decorative picture of Nine Egrets dated to 1725 and an album of Stories of Farmers dated to 1730.76 The signature that appears on most works of this period is Jinmen Huashi Leng Mei (­Painting Master

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2.21 Chen Mei (active 1700s–40s), Scholar and Attendants on Woodland Path. Hanging scroll mounted on panel, ink and color on silk, 105.5 x 92.4 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., purchase, F1965.24

[i.e., professional painter] from the Golden Gate [the imperial court], Leng Mei). The Jinmen, which he uses also in his seals, asserts with pride his status as a former court painter; he presumably would not have used it while serving in the Academy. Gu Jianlong used a seal with those words, Jinmen Huashi, with the same implication. There are also some paintings that bear no signatures, but only Leng Mei seals— the British Museum’s Woman Resting from Reading (see figure 5.13) is one of them—works that do not match in style those with safe signatures, and should probably be ascribed to studio followers. Their existence encourages the hypothesis that Leng Mei, during his years away from court, set up a studio to fill the demand for the kinds of functional works with which we are concerned. Painting studios in China were commonly family studios, in which relatives were employed to color or otherwise complete compositions sketched out by the master, or to fulfill less important commissions.77 In the year immediately following his return to the court, 1736, Leng Mei asked and obtained permission from the Qianlong emperor to employ his son Leng Jian to help him; a second son, Leng Quan, appears to have worked in the capital but was never employed at court.78 It is possible that these two, and perhaps others, had been apprentices or assistants to Leng Mei during his years away, and that the Leng Mei studio, once established, continued after his return to the Imperial Academy (and probably beyond his lifetime) to produce high-quality figure compositions, relying on the prestige of Leng’s name and his association with the Academy but also on the technical excellence of their creations. These questions, and especially the roles of Jiao Bingzhen, Leng Mei, and other court masters in the flourishing production from the second quarter of the eighteenth century of high-level academic-style figure paintings in the Beijing region but outside the court, will be pursued further in the next chapter.

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three

Adoptions from the West

Recognizing the Appropriations Both non-Chinese and Chinese scholars have shown a surprising resistance to recognizing the appropriations made by late-Ming and early Qing Chinese artists from European pictorial art.1 Even now, long after it has been established more or less inescapably that such a cross-cultural transfer took place, the resistance continues, typically arguing that recognizing and attempting to define the elements of foreign style that entered Chinese painting at this time is a project tainted by Euro­centric or “orientalist” motives, so that it is unmannerly and impolitic to discuss them publicly. To continue to shy away from the subject, on the other hand, would cripple if not rule out altogether studies such as the present one, a consideration that seems reason enough for violating the taboo. Whatever their motivations, quite a number of writers have gone to some lengths to play down adoptions from Western art in Ming-Qing China, at least those occurring before the early eighteenth century, when they became too obvious in Imperial Academy and other painting to be ignored. In this way of thinking, their presence from that period onward can be dismissed as a kind of inconsequential aberration within the large tradition. I argue, to the contrary, that elements of style and ­devices

of representation adopted from Western pictorial art are pervasive and important in Chinese painting in diverse contexts from the late Ming on, and that recognizing them in no way demeans the Chinese artists who did the appropriating—in fact, it demonstrates their salutary openness within what had otherwise become a dangerously self-absorbed artistic tradition. Their adoptions can on the whole be credited, I believe, with enhancing the liveliness and interest of their works, in the same way that French artists of the second half of the nineteenth century who were somehow affected by the newly introduced Japanese prints produced, as a group, more interesting works than those who held firmly to the old native tradition and kept it unsullied if moribund. In China as in France, the appropriations were liberating rather than confining, giving artists the courage to break out of old habits that had become stultifying.2 For painters who made their livings by their art, moreover, devices that rendered their pictures more striking, more compelling, and thereby more salable held obvious attractions. Some of the discomfort this issue has provoked could be alleviated if we avoid constructing the relationships on a pattern of “influence,” which in this kind of con­ text implies that one culture, seen as dominant, has imposed its ways on another, “receiving,” culture. As Michael Baxandall points out, that common way of stating the matter gets it upside down: it is the artists of the “receiving” culture who, quite of their own volition, choose to adopt (or appropriate, absorb, assimilate—Baxandall supplies a list of verbs and suggests that many more could be added) whatever they find attractive or useful from the foreign pictorial materials that have somehow become accessible to them. 3 Regarded this way, the adoptions can be seen as enabling factors, not restrictive determinants. A crucial point to be made about Chinese adoptions from Western pictorial art, moreover, is that they were mostly adoptions of style, less often of imagery. The Chinese, that is, picked up from the foreign pictures useful techniques for representing visual forms more convincingly, or achieving effects of space and threedimensionality, or for composing scenes in what were for them fresh and unhackneyed ways. This is in marked contrast to the practice of some Mughal painters of India in the same period, who reproduced whole European compositions with Christian imagery—the Madonna and Child, scenes of the life of Christ, and the like.4 A few Ming-Qing Chinese artists did that kind of picture also, to be sure, but their productions belong more to the history of Christianity in China than to the history of art.5 Some of the best Chinese artists of the time, on the other hand, adopted elements of Western style and used them in Chinese contexts, whence they were ultimately absorbed into the fabric of Chinese painting, a process that is in no way incompatible with originality. It should not be necessary to add that the late Ming and early Qing was a period of high creativity in Chinese painting as a whole, and that great painters flourished then who were only slightly affected, or remained quite unaffected, by what they could see of European pictorial art: Bada Shanren, Hongren, Kuncan, Shitao in most of his work, Wang Yuanqi, to name only a few. My argument is only that ex-

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posure to the European pictures opened to Chinese painters a broad range of unfamiliar modes of representation, compositional types, and illusionistic devices on which they could draw as they pleased; that many artists chose to make some use of these; and that the contributions of those who did significantly enriched and diversified Chinese painting of this period. I also believe that the painters treated in this book were especially inventive in adopting some of the foreign techniques into a conservative tradition that was badly in need of such enlivening input. In any case, Westernizing elements of style are more or less a constant in paintings of the kind this book is about, and are by no means minor intrusions. Without overemphasizing these or underplaying the continuity with the conservative Chinese tradition, one can infer from the evidence that the “intrusions” in fact had a good deal to do with permitting this tradition to break out of the relatively low state into which it had otherwise fallen by the late Ming and manifest some new vigor and originality. If, that is, the basic urban-academic tradition of professional painting had simply gone on being purely Chinese, conservative in a negative sense, it would probably not merit as much attention as it is receiving here. It is worth adding that the derogatory judgments of Occidental painting made by a few eighteenth-century Chinese writers, judgments that are sometimes quoted as representing the view of “the Chinese” as a whole, do not really represent a consensus view. Wu Li (1632–1718), early in the century, contrasted the “spiritual excellence” of the Chinese tradition with Western artists’ devices for “capturing a formal likeness,” a distinction that in the rhetoric of Chinese critical writings amounted virtually to a dismissal of the foreign works. The critic Zhang Geng in the mideighteenth century wrote that the foreign manner is “not worthy of refined appreciation, and lovers of antiquity will not adopt it.” The painter Zou Yigui (1686– 1772), about the same time, wrote of Western pictures, “Students can pick up a point or two from them, as tricks for catching the eye. But they are completely lacking in brush method, and their skill is nothing but artisanry.”6 But these opinions must be taken in context: all three writers were themselves landscapists in the Orthodox manner, and were writing from that special standpoint. (Zou Yigui also painted flowers, in a style not entirely free of Westernizing elements.) Theirs, then, was only one rather narrow view. The practice of other painters of the time and the taste of the larger public appear to have been very different. Semi-Westernized styles were vigorously promoted, for instance, among Academy artists in Beijing by the Qianlong emperor7—and, judging from extant paintings done in their Academies, by Kangxi and Yongzheng before him.8 That they were also popular among urban audiences this chapter will attempt to establish. Present-day writers, then, who avoid touching on the phenomenon of adoptions from Western art into later Chinese painting in the belief that this avoidance honors the feelings of “the Chinese” are in truth being protective only of a particular Chinese literati-elite viewpoint. It is as though scholars working in European-American cultural studies were to eschew certain directions of investigation for fear of offending the sensitivities of the “dead white males” and their successors who have until

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recently dominated the discourse. That would rightly be regarded as a misdirected scrupulousness, and so should its equivalent in Chinese art studies. The Qing-period practice of painting in some variety of the semi-Westernized or Sino-European illusionistic style (sometimes called a “hybrid” style, a word with some negative connotations) is customarily located primarily in the Imperial Painting Academy in Beijing. It was indeed conspicuous there; but it flourished also, and far more extensively, in the workshops of urban professional artists in the Jiangnan cities. The distinction between the two loci of production is not absolutely sharp, since, as we saw in the preceding chapter, artists could move between them, and Academy painters also did some work outside the court. But for purposes of discus­ sion the two can be treated as separate. Both in the court and in the cities, paintings with some admixture of Western-inspired illusionism coexisted with ­Orthodox-​ school landscapes and other “respectable” modes of painting. The Westernizing elements in painting as practiced by the artists of the urban centers in the south derived in part, but only in part, from the continuing interaction between them and the Academy in Beijing. By the early Qing period the semi-Westernized styles had already attained considerable currency in these Jiangnan cities (notably Suzhou, Nanjing, and Yangzhou) quite independently of the Academy. Western modes did not, that is, simply trickle down from the imperial court, as one prominent scholar once construed it, writing, “The influence of Western art, if it did not peter out altogether, trickled like sand to the lower levels of the professional and the craftsman painters, where it stayed till modern times.” 9 The artists dismissed so disparagingly there are exactly the ones who can be credited with creating most of the paintings in this book. Adoptions from Western The practice of semi-Westernized styles by artists active in cities of the Jiangnan Pictures in the Jiangnan Cities region in the late Ming and early Qing took a variety of forms. These were not aspects of some single, cohesive art-historical phenomenon, but rather highly separate and diverse choices, having in common only the artists’ adoption from the foreign sources of elements of style and illusionistic techniques that were somehow useful to them. A few examples from the works of painters active in this period in Suzhou, Nanjing, and Yangzhou—painters of various types, not just the vernacular or studio masters, and including for our present purpose a few landscapists—will be introduced briefly here to illustrate this observation, before we turn to the Imperial Academy.10

Suzhou

The ways in which certain late-Ming painters in Suzhou, most of all Zhang Hong (1577–ca. 1652), adopted elements of European style into their pictures I have already discussed in a number of writings, using comparisons that I hope have left few readers unpersuaded—for instance, of leaves from Zhang’s 1639 album of Scenes of Yue, or his 1652 album of The Zhi Garden, with engravings from the Braun and Hogenberg Civitatis orbis terrarum (Cities of the World; Cologne, 1572–1616), a

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work that is known to have been accessible to Chinese artists by this period.11 The discussions need not be repeated here, nor the pictures reproduced once more. Paintings making use of Western style by Zhang Hong and others in the late Ming and early Qing are predecessors of the popular woodblock color prints produced in Suzhou offering panoramic scenes of that and other cities, some of which are dated to the 1730s and 1740s.12 In these the exoticism is much more pronounced than in all but a very few paintings of the time, and was clearly seen as a selling point and an accomplishment by the printmakers, who sometimes even labeled their pictures as being in the Western manner. Pictures of Suzhou and its environs, meant for sale to tourists and locals both, had been a staple among the output of the city’s artists at least since the sixteenth century; and in all periods a production of pictures on a popular level must have coexisted with the making of paintings of the city and its landmarks by prestigious literati masters. Of course, it is almost entirely the latter that have been preserved in China—even the eighteenth-century prints are to be found mostly in Japanese and other foreign collections. The Suzhou print designers, like the ukiyo’e print masters in Japan, embraced eagerly—critics of the time would have said shamelessly—any available means of increasing the novelty and salability of their prints. Some of these reveal devices of Europeanized illusionism more emphatic than any to be found in the paintings (with a few exceptions): strong chiaroscuro, figures casting shadows on the ground, or insistent linear perspective in prints that are Chinese counterparts (and the principal sources) of the uki’e (perspective prints) being made in Japan in the same period (figures 3.1 and 3.2). Prints of this kind were intended sometimes to be looked at in peepshow viewing boxes, which contained a monocular lens that enhanced their illusion of depth. Perspectival prints employing the Italian converging-line system were well suited to this special use, but in themselves seem bizarre and disturbing within the Chinese context, and the foreign device of linear perspective was wisely avoided by most painters working outside the Imperial Academy, at least by those whose works survive to be seen.13

Nanjing and Jiading

A consideration of painting in Nanjing affected by Western elements can begin with the presence there in the late Ming of Wu Bin (active 1573–ca. 1625), who will be considered below as an artist in the Imperial Academy, and Tseng Qing (1568– 1650), the leading portraitist of that period. Both began their careers in Putian on the Fujian coast, near the thriving port city of Quanzhou, where trade with the Portuguese had no doubt made foreign pictures accessible by the sixteenth century, and these pictures must have affected both artists in their early development. This is not the place to discuss the adoption of elements of European style into late-Ming portraiture, except to note that the striking revival of portraiture as a lively and popular art form in that period depended heavily on this cross-fertilization and the arresting effects it permitted. The new techniques, as Chinese writers of the time

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3.1 Suzhou print, perhaps a New Year’s picture. Dated 1743. Woodblock print with touches of pigment, 98.2 x 53.5 cm. The British Museum, London. © The Trustees of The British Museum.

3.2 Suzhou print, Pleasures in a Pavilion by a Lotus Pond. Color woodblock, two prints forming a single composition; one 74.6 x 56.3 cm, the other 73.6 x 56 cm. Umi-Mori Art Museum, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan.

put it, made the picture look like a reflection of the sitter in a mirror, an observation that was made of Tseng Qing’s portraits in particular.14 The impact of the foreign art was especially strong in Nanjing, where one of the principal Jesuit missions was located. Motifs and compositional devices taken from European pictures that are encountered frequently in works by the so-called Eight Masters of Jinling (i.e., Nanjing)—all active in the early Qing period and all primarily landscapists—include illusionistic lighting, flat recessions, clearly marked horizons, foreshortened boats and bridges, and buildings with viewable interior spaces. A striking example in which the foreign elements are unmistakable is a handscroll by Fan Qi in the Berlin Museum: the horizon shaded with fine horizontal strokes and with boats disappearing over it, partly cut off by the horizon line, has an exact parallel and probable source in one of the illustrations to the life of Christ by Nadal (cf. figures 3.11 and 3.12, below), a book that was well known in China at that time.15 In many works by others of the Nanjing group—Zou Zhe, Gao Cen, Wu Hung, Ye Xin—the Europeanized features, though less conspicuous, are nonetheless clearly present. Among the Nanjing masters it was Gong Xian (ca. 1617–89) who put elements of Western style and imagery to the most brilliantly creative uses, employing them for mysteriously “real” visions of worlds where, as he put it, no one had ever gone.16 These are among the most compelling of early Qing paintings, and exemplify again a successful fusion of foreign elements into a unified style, so completely integrated that only when the landscapes are juxtaposed with the European engravings that in some part inspired them do we realize that they cannot have arisen purely out of a Chinese tradition.17 Like Arthur Waley, who in a memorable passage at the very end of his 1923 book on Chinese painting called Gong Xian “perhaps the most original of [the] early Qing painters,”18 or the late-nineteenth-century French critics who found certain of Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji oddly arresting in their striking effects of sunset light or sudden pulls into depth, Western viewers who respond to Gong Xian’s painting with more immediacy than to other kinds of Chinese landscape may not realize that borrowings from their own tradition underlie these effects and account in part for their curious sense of familiarity and accessibility. Working in the smaller city of Jiading, located about twenty miles northeast of Shanghai, was the less-known painter Shen Cang (active 1679–1714), a specialist in landscapes with buildings and figures in a fine and detailed style. The local history relates that he visited Beijing and there met “people from Western lands,” from whom he presumably learned the foreign techniques seen in his paintings. If this is true, he may be an exception to my generalization about artists of the southern cities adopting elements of Western style independently of the northern capital. In the case of Shen’s Autumn Thoughts on a Stream Bridge (figure 3.3), painted in 1705, these elements are seen in the powerfully volumetric rendering of the massive bluff that towers over the tiny figures in the lower left, a scholar with a staff and his servant crossing the bridge of the title. Buildings in the ravine behind them, and a pagoda-like structure beside the road at right (echoed in the distance by needle-

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3.3

peak mountains), exhibit Shen Cang’s meticulous architectural drawing. Imposing earth masses like the one that dominates this picture, unified by highlight and shadow and crossed by bands of mist, had been seen earlier in landscapes by Wu Bin and Gong Xian; both had drawn distantly on Northern Song monumental landscape paintings for this feature, along with the foreign models. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as Yangzhou expanded in its wealth and cultural attractions, Gong Xian and many other artists from Nanjing, from the Huizhou region in Anhui, and from elsewhere in the Jiangnan region moved to Yangzhou and were active there. Another, somewhat later painter who made the move from Nanjing to Yangzhou was the monk Daocun (or Shizhuang), whose album of eight scenes of Mount Tiantai, bearing a cyclical date that probably corresponds to 1706, offers an extreme, striking case of landscape in a semi-­ Westernized manner (figures 3.4 and 3.5).19 Like some of the Suzhou popular prints, it might even deserve the term hybrid style, since the combining of Chinese tradition with Western illusionism in it is distinctly bizarre. Presumably the artist intended the resulting effect of alienation to convey some sense of the unworldly, fantastic grandeur of the Tiantai scenery. All these are landscapes, and are introduced here only to establish the pervasiveness of the phenomenon we are tracing. No strong practice of figure painting appears to have existed in Nanjing in the early Qing. An exception is Zhou Xun (active in the late seventeenth century), who came from nearby Jiangning but was probably active chiefly in Nanjing. He was best known for paintings of dragons, but also did figures and horses-and-grooms.20 Most of his paintings feature strong light-and-shadow effects, although in other respects they are fairly traditional.

Shen Cang (active 1679–1714), Au­ tumn Thoughts on a Stream Bridge. Album leaf, ink on paper, 29.8 x 45.2 cm. Ostasiatische Kunstsammlung, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin (inv. no. 1960–5).

3.4 and 3.5 Daocun (Shizhuang, active probably early eighteenth century), two leaves from the album Eight Scenes of Mount Tiantai. Dated 1706. Ink and colors on silk, each leaf 36.2 x 28 cm. From Sotheby’s auction catalog, New York, June 1, 1988, no. 72; also Sotheby’s Hong Kong, “Fine Chinese Paintings from the Currier Collection,” May 1, 2000, no. 109, where the date is read as 1766 and the artist’s death date is given as 1792.

Yangzhou

Yangzhou was later than other cities of the Jiangnan region in becoming a major center of painting. Wealth and patronage shifted there from other places, notably southern Anhui, in the late seventeenth century and remained there through much of the eighteenth. Support for artists, which drew them from many places, came most notably from the rich and famous salt merchants and their salons, but also from a large, prosperous urban elite and middle class. In Yangzhou it was made up of a mix of merchants, officials, restaurateurs, entertainers, successful artisans, and the like. Turning away for a moment from the familiar productions of the so-called Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou and other masters who worked in related styles, one encounters quite a number of artists active there who were engaged somehow in the Westernizing direction. We will touch on only a few of them, and briefly. To begin with, Yuan Jiang and the closely related artist Li Yin, along with Yuan Jiang’s son or nephew Yuan Yao—all professional masters active in Yangzhou in the Kangxi and Yongzheng eras (as introduced in the previous chapter)—were deeply involved in the project of turning elements of Western style to Chinese purposes, using the Song academic tradition of landscapes-with-palaces as a basis. Their

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c­ ontemporaries Xiao Chen (active ca. 1680–1710) and Wang Yun (1652–1735 or after), also Yangzhou professional masters who worked in finished, traditional styles enlivened to some slight degree by touches of illusionism, can be passed over more quickly.21 They can represent others about whom the same might be said. The Zhejiang painter Shen Quan (Shen Nanpin, 1682–ca. 1760), a specialist in flowersand-birds and animals in landscape settings, came from Wuxing but was active in Yangzhou in his later years, after returning in 1733 from a two-year stay in Japan. Many of his works have been preserved and treasured in Japan; he was the only respected Chinese painter before the nineteenth century to spend time in that insular country, and even he was not allowed to travel outside the trading port of Nagasaki, where he taught pupils in a style that was based in traditional Chinese painting but also strongly affected by new Western pictorial ideas. More than one recent writer has tried to play down or deny the Westernized illusionism to be seen in Shen’s works.22 But this is, once more, a misdirected and ultimately fruitless pursuit, as even a cursory survey of his paintings should reveal: the birds and animals in them, though based in large part on models from the Song and Ming Academies, exhibit also Shen’s particular version of European-style modeling with pronounced highlights, and their natural settings similarly betray in their rendering of light and space a reliance on sources outside the Chinese tradition. Good examples are the leaves of an album of animals and birds in landscape settings that Shen painted in 1740, especially one representing an ox drinking from a stream (figure 3.6). Shen Quan’s inscription identifies his paintings as “reduced-size copies of works by Song artists,” but no Song painter could have modeled the animal so illusionistically, or suggested such a play of light and shadow on the stream bank and the trees. These

3.6 Shen Quan (1682–ca. 1760), Ox Drinking from a Stream. Leaf from a twelve-leaf album Flowers, Birds, and Animals, after Song Masters. Dated 1740. Ink and colors on silk, 20.6 x 31 cm. Collection of Phoenix Art ­Museum, gift of Marilyn and Roy Papp.

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artists’ quite sophisticated audiences regarded their admixtures of Western style for the most part positively (the success of the artists and the widespread practice of the styles afford ample evidence of that). Recognizing as much puts into proper perspective the dismissals by adherents of the Orthodox school of landscape that were cited earlier, and frees us from the impulse to “protect” the artists by denying evidences of their appropriations from Western art, as if these were somehow ­contaminating. The leading Yangzhou portraitist of the early Qing, Yu Zhiding, was also introduced in the preceding chapter (see figure 2.4). Some of his portraits continue Tseng Qing’s practice of making striking use of Western illusionism; others appear to be entirely in the Chinese tradition, with no hint of foreign-derived effects. An extraordinarily versatile master, he appears to have been able to move smoothly through a variety of styles and genres. Adoptions from Western Painting in the Early Qing Court

Elements of Westernizing illusionism can be said to have entered into styles practiced at the imperial court beginning with the late-Ming master Wu Bin, a native of Fujian province who painted for the courts of both Nanjing and Beijing, as well as for patrons and institutions (such as Buddhist temples) outside them.23 Many of Wu’s works, such as the album Record of the Year’s Holidays, painted about 1600, evince striking adoptions from European pictures, especially from engravings viewable in Nanjing, where one of the principal Jesuit missions was located.24 European works of art offered new ways of organizing complex compositions by locating the elements of the picture on a convincingly receding ground plane. Other features of these pictures—foreshortened boats, a bridge that narrows into distance, a reflection in the water, representations of buildings that permit the viewer to observe people and objects inside them—likewise betray Wu Bin’s adoption of elements (I have termed them “pictorial ideas”) from the foreign art into a Chinese context for Chinese purposes. Wu Bin’s practice as a late-Ming court artist was important in establishing a basis for the development of Qing Imperial Academy painting. A lesser master who served in the court during the first Qing reign (1644–61) was Huang Yingshen (1596–1676 or after), who was from Beijing. His few surviving works exhibit a similar, if somewhat stiffer and more polished, mixture of traditional Chinese academic style with obvious adoptions from European art.25 It is in the work of Jiao Bingzhen, who was introduced in the previous chapter as a northern master active at court during the Kangxi era, that the Westernizing elements become more overt and unmistakable. His handscroll representing a part of Kangxi’s southern progress, for example, is laid out more in the manner of a European-style bird’s-eye view than as a traditional Chinese landscape panorama.26 Even more striking Westernizing features appear in the work for which Jiao Bingzhen is best remembered, his Gengzhi Tu (Pictures of Rice Culture and Silk Culture), a project he carried out from 1689 on imperial commission.27 Jiao’s series of paintings, which consisted of two sets of twenty-three pictures each, now survives

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3.7 and 3.8 After Jiao Bingzhen (active ca. 1680– 1726), two leaves from Gengzhi Tu. Woodblock-printed pictures, ink on paper, each leaf 24.4 x 24.4 cm. Courtesy of C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

3.9 and 3.10 Jiao Bingzhen, leaves from an album of Palace Ladies. Ink and colors on silk, each 30 x 21.2 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

only in copies, and in the woodblock-printed series made for wide dissemination and issued in 1696. Notable in this series (see figures 3.7 and 3.8), along with some often-noted uses of linear perspective, are compositions constructed with successive spaces, one opening back into the next; “see-through” effects that encourage the viewer to explore these spaces visually; and connecting elements placed to facilitate passage between them (for instance, the two dogs seen in the upper left of figure 3.8). Examples of the last device can be seen in northern European, especially Dutch, paintings.28 Several surviving albums of paintings by Jiao Bingzhen portray ladies of the court, or imperial consorts, engaged in their leisurely pursuits within palace settings (see, e.g., figures 3.9 and 3.10). The genre to which these belong was a very old specialization of court painters, extending back to figure masters such as Zhang Xuan and Zhou Fang (both active in the eighth century) in the Tang period; it had been taken up again in the Ming by Du Jin, Qiu Ying, and other urban painters. But a glance at the leaves in Jiao Bingzhen’s albums will reveal how unlike these predecessors they are. For one thing, they introduce a new image of palace ladies: willowy-thin, slope-shouldered, elongated bodies with no articulation beneath the robes; oval, flat-fronted heads with facial features bunched in the center. The crucial difference, however, is the introduction of foreign-derived optical illusionism. Jiao Bingzhen’s engagement with European pictorial art, and his creation of a hybrid style incorporating some elements from it into the Chinese academic tradition, has been generally recognized by both Chinese and foreign writers. Zhang Geng in the mid-eighteenth century wrote of him, “Jiao Bingzhen of Jining [Shandong] served as an official in the imperial observatory. He was skilled in painting figures, which vary in size according to their placement near or far. He does this with perfect accuracy because he uses Western methods.”29 Jiao was central in the creation of the semi-Westernized style within the early Qing court, and in its institutionalization within the Academy, carrying on a process that Wu Bin had begun. Jiao had learned elements of European style, such as Western perspective and shading, while serving as an official in the imperial observatory together with European astronomers. 30 He may also have brought with him to the capital a northern figure style already strongly affected by foreign pictures—a possibility that will be further considered below. He combined these new illusionistic devices, however acquired, with the staples of the basic Chinese conservative and academic tradition to form a new hybrid mode. In this mode certain distinguishing traits of style and motifs should be especially noted, since they appear frequently in the paintings that are our concern. These include effects of three-dimensionality achieved by shading in the folds of the women’s dresses and on architectural elements such as pillars and stone steps; the drawing of open windows and doors so as to display the thickness of the wall; and, most important, compositions that pull one’s gaze back into depths beyond the foreground picture space, giving the viewer the sense of seeming to penetrate these spaces visually, looking through lattices, translucent curtains, and moon doors and windows into farther rooms or rear gardens.

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New Systems of Pictorial Space

An issue that has underlain all the foregoing discussions of Westernizing elements in Qing-period Chinese painting, and that needs now to be brought to the fore, is the importance of distinguishing two very different types of sources for the foreign elements of style that entered Chinese painting in the early and middle Qing. On the one hand are the books and verbal teachings of the Jesuits, from which some Chinese artists, most of them at the imperial court, were able to learn the rules of linear perspective, an Italian quasi-scientific set of techniques for seeming to locate viewers in relation to the space and materials of the picture and draw their gaze systematically into depth. On the other hand were the pictorial ideas that Qing-period artists were able to absorb, wordlessly and probably in large part unconsciously, from the European prints and paintings, mostly of northern origin (Dutch and Flemish), that became available in this period for their viewing and study. Chief among the latter were the effects of light-and-dark shading and of the new, more complex systems of spaces opening back beyond the foreground, spaces into which the viewer’s eye could be drawn—not along receding, ultimately converging lines, as in the Italian perspective system, but through windows and doors, or beyond and between objects to further objects and figures diminished in size. Many Qing painters recognized in these foreign devices the potential for expanding the expressive capacities of their pictures, and found creative means of adapting and transforming them to suit their special purposes. This difference in foreign-derived spatial systems within Qing painting can be seen to reflect a crucial difference in fundamental purpose and direction that has been recognized in European painting of the same period, notably in the writings of Svetlana Alpers, between southern (Italian) and northern (Dutch and Flemish) schools of painting. 31 Illusionistic effects of the northern kinds, light-and-shadow modeling (chiaroscuro) and spaces that seemed to draw the viewer’s gaze into them, were achievements of European pictures that struck Chinese viewers forcibly. Zou Yigui, who was quoted earlier dismissing Western paintings as “nothing but artisanry,” wrote of the foreign artists, “when they paint houses on a wall, people are tempted to walk into them.”32 In fact, a wall painting by a Jesuit artist was said to have offered such a convincing effect of space beyond the picture plane that Chinese visitors did just that, and “hit their heads against the wall trying to walk into it.”33 The story, though scarcely plausible, indicates the spatial persuasiveness that the Chinese attributed to such paintings, as does a passage (to be cited in chapter 5) in the novel Honglou Meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber) in which an old woman, tipsy and in semidarkness, bumps against a wall, fooled by the Western-style light-andshadow painting of a young woman hanging there. The practice in Qing pictorial art of constructing see-through compositions with connected spaces opening into depth, then, must have been based on northern European models, Dutch or Flemish. There is ample evidence that many Flemish books with engravings, printed principally in Antwerp, were circulating in China in the seventeenth century. Numerous Dutch and Flemish oil paintings with comparable see-through articulations of space can be found, some of them so close in

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3.11 and 3.12 Jan and Jerome Wierix, engraved illustrations to Nadal, Evangelicae historiae imagines (1593–94). Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

their imagery to the Chinese pictures of women in interiors popular in this period (cf. figures 3.13 and 3.14) that we can suppose them to have been the ultimate sources for the type. But it is difficult to determine by what route of transmission the oil paintings might have become known to Chinese artists. Provisionally, we can suppose that what the Chinese saw were engravings based on the paintings, a common and popular mode of pictorial reproduction in Europe. Engravings of other subjects as well, such as the illustrations by the brothers Jan and Jerome Wierix to Nadal’s life of Christ, Evangelicae historiae imagines (1593–94), which is known to have been in China and to have impressed artists and others there, also would have provided numerous models for this perspectival device (figures 3.11 and 3.12). 34 By the early decades of the eighteenth century, moreover, a great many secular European prints were being brought to China to supply designs for porcelain decoration. David Howard and John Ayers write, in their book China for the West, “In no more than a decade, from 1735–45, some hundreds of scenes [from European

engravings]: historical, political and commercial, topographical and personal, mythological, religious, literary, picturesque and domestic had been translated onto porcelain.”35 They illustrate, among other relevant pieces, a set of four enameled porcelain screen panels, which they date “ca. 1725–1740,” all with compositions featuring figure groups in the foreground and houses behind, in which furniture and other objects are seen through open windows drawn so as to show the thickness of the walls. They comment, “the buildings display some Western elements, and the figure groups are clearly adapted in part from Western designs.”36 The probability that the paintings of beautiful women in illusionistically depicted boudoirs by Leng Mei and others (cf. Yu Zhiding’s, figure 5.18, and Jin Tingbiao’s, figure 2.17) depend in significant part on foreign models is strongly supported by their striking similarities to paintings of the same subject by seventeenth-century European, especially northern, artists. When an undated example by Leng Mei (figure 3.13), probably done in the 1720s, is compared to the 1657 painting of a similar subject by Wang Qiao (figure 1.6), the far stronger visual impact and effectiveness of Leng’s painting cannot be accounted for simply by the passage of time and the development of new expressive techniques within Chinese painting. The foreign source of these techniques becomes clear when it is compared, instead, with a painting by Gerard Dou dated 1667 (figure 3.14). In both, the women are placed in carefully constructed, readable spaces behind a drape that hangs from the top of the composition, acting as a proscenium marker. Luxury objects on tables are lovingly depicted. The woman looks out at us, directly in one and by way of the mirror in the other, while her maid does her hair. These and other close correspondences, together with the fact that these features appear in China just about the time Chinese artists were adopting a diversity of other stylistic and compositional traits from European pictorial art, appear to rule out coincidence. Only the channel of transmission is still unclear; the strongest likelihood is that it was by way of European engravings after paintings, which, as noted above, were being brought to China in large numbers by this time. 37 Other uses of the newly acquired capacity to open up space in the pictures will be examined in later chapters: for permitting deep visual access to the boudoir and imaginary engagement with the beautiful women in the meiren paintings, for narrative ends in the illustrational albums, and so forth. In these, the foreign-derived devices were no longer employed as exoticisms, or simply for striking illusionistic effects; in the hands of Gu Jianlong and others, they opened the way to creative innovations that significantly expanded the expressive capacities of painting of these kinds. In multifigure scenes, spatial complexities could be made to read as interpersonal and emotional complexities; implicit narratives could be embedded in compositions constructed with interconnecting spaces. Particularly striking are the uses of Western-inspired illusionism for erotic effects, the ways in which scopophilic pleasures can be intensified by drawing the viewer’s gaze more insistently into a feminized picture space and making the materials he encounters there appear palpable. How these new capacities transformed the genre of meiren paintings from

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3.13 Leng Mei (ca. 1670–1742 or after), Beautiful Woman at Dressing Table, with Attendant. Collection unknown. From Shinü Hua Xuanji (Beijing: Palace Museum, n.d.), pl. 29.

3.14 Gerard Dou, Young Woman at Her Dressing Table. Dated 1667. Easel painting, oil pigments on canvas, 75.5 x 58 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

the end of the seventeenth century into the eighteenth will be explored in the fifth chapter. In contrast to their fascination with the see-through composition, Chinese painters made only infrequent and relatively inconspicuous uses of the Italian system of vanishing-point perspective, which they could have learned from the Jesuits at court, since several books on architectural perspective were available in China by then. 38 It was called in Chinese xianfa hua (linear-method pictures), and may have been distinguished originally (more research is needed) from toushi hua (lookingthrough pictures), which is now the standard Chinese term for perspective. It is tempting to think that the latter originally might have designated what I am calling the see-through device, the former the Italian linear system, but I have found no textual support for that conjecture. In any case, the two terms appear to have been used more or less interchangeably in most writings. Studies of Chinese uses of Western perspective, though detailed and historically informed, have failed to distinguish between the two methods, Italian and northern European, and the resulting confusion has impeded clarification of the actual usages of these different

3.15 and 3.16 Chen Mei (active 1700s–40s), leaves from Yueman Qingyu (Occupations of the Months). Dated 1738. Album of twelve leaves, ink and colors on silk, 37 x 31.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

modes. 39 The northern see-through device of interconnecting spaces, favored by Jiao Bingzhen and others, allowed them to partly dissolve the picture plane and open up illusions of space in their pictures in ways that Chinese audiences found unfamiliar, but not so forcefully and disturbingly as true central or vanishing-point linear perspective would have done. It is true that converging-lines perspective was used by court artists for highly illusionistic, even trompe l’oeil wall paintings in the palaces, some of which can still be seen, and that some large palace pictures with figures follow insistently this system of perspective.40 More cautious uses of it can be seen also in some smaller paintings by Jiao Bingzhen and other court artists. But in these the use of the device is usually inconspicuous, and even while it may work to make the space of the picture more readable, its presence is often detectable only by careful analysis. The popular Suzhou woodblock prints in which the vanishing-point linear system was employed wholeheartedly and the composition constructed around it (e.g., figure 3.2), like the Japanese uki’e prints that do the same,41 testify to the wisdom of most Chinese painters in avoiding it: the effect of joining the relatively flat, linear forms of East Asian pictorial styles with the quasi-scientific European spatial system is bizarre and aesthetically uncomfortable. The northern see-through system, by contrast, seems in the paintings by Jiao Bingzhen and the others to be quite compatible with traditional Chinese orthogonal or parallel-line recession. Other artists active at court carried on the style formulated by Jiao Bingzhen, especially two of his pupils, Leng Mei and Chen Mei. The leaves in an album titled Yueman Qingyu, representing occupations of palace women in the twelve months of the year, painted by Chen Mei in 1738, reveal how little (except in the depiction of the women) he departed from Jiao Bingzhen’s model, and remind us once more that individual style was not a desideratum among court artists (figures 3.15 and 3.16).42 The portrayal of the women follows Jiao Bingzhen’s type while giving them more substance and permitting greater natural movement. Chen’s interior scene teems with the trappings of wealth and culture, all depicted in meticulous detail: in the inner room a landscape hanging scroll, along with a wrapped qin (zither); antique bronzes and ceramics on the table in the left foreground; more scroll paintings and antiquities being examined by the ladies. Two incense braziers with basketry covers stand on the floor, the nearer one with its cover beside it—these were used both for heating and for perfuming clothing and quilts, which would be stretched over them. Some of the objects, notably the crackled-glaze meiping vase on the table, appear three-dimensional by virtue of realistic shading carried even further, it seems, than in Jiao Bingzhen’s pictures. The arrival at court in 1715 of the Italian missionarypainter Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining) catalyzed the practice of Westernized styles at court by opening new techniques of pictorial illusionism to those Academy artists who chose or were required to use them. The major role as a teacher of other Academy painters accorded Lang Shining by the emperors under whom he served, and his prominence as the leading (first-listed) artist in a number of collaborative works, testify to the emperors’ sponsorship of the illusionistic styles.

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A “Northern School” of Figure and Figure-in- Landscape Painting?

Some versions of the semi-Europeanized manner of painting, as we have seen, were developed in the Jiangnan cities and brought to the capital by artists who went there on their own or were invited to court; others took form within the Imperial Academy. Most court artists, as described in the foregoing chapter, also worked for patrons and clients outside the court, before, after, or even during their service there, thus facilitating the spread of the Academy-developed modes into the larger society. This freedom of employment obtained especially during the Kangxi period, when control over the Academy artists was light,43 but it continued also under the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors. Still unexplored, however, is the possibility that the Westernizing elements that appear so strongly in the painting of the early Qing Academy came not only directly from foreigners and foreign books accessible to the court artists, or from Jiangnan painters who brought them from the south when they moved into court service, but also indirectly from a tradition of figure and figure-in-landscape painting already well established in the north, in the region of the capital and in the cities of Shandong.44 Artists of the Beijing region could see European and foreign-style paintings in the Christian churches there; Fa Ruozhen (1613–96) from Shandong was painting strange landscapes in which he used strong shading to impart striking volumetric effects to the earth forms, and rendered areas of fog and misty space illusionistically in ways outside traditional Chinese practice.45

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ad o pt i o n s fr o m th e w e st

If we seek a hypothetical northern school of figure painting as background for the style brought into the Academy by Jiao Bingzhen—the elongated women’s bodies and faces, mannered postures, heavy shading—we can see its probable inception most strikingly in the works of the late-Ming master Cui Zizhong (d. 1644), who similarly was born in Shandong and worked in the Beijing region. Cui’s archaistically attenuated portrayals of women might plausibly be taken as underlying Jiao’s. Cui Zizhong, though accounts of his life present him as a lonely and ultimately tragic figure, cannot have been a completely isolated artist, even though the accounts do not mention followers or a family studio. A hypothetical outgrowth of his highly distinctive figure manner can be provisionally identified, for instance in an album of pictures of arhats (enlightened disciples of the Buddha) by an unidentified artist of the late Ming or early Qing, which seems to represent an extremist recension of Cui’s style that exaggerates its salient features: heavier shading, even more bizarre postures, the perversely jagged drawing of clothing folds.46 All these, like the same features of style in Cui Zizhong’s work, can be read if one chooses as aspects of archaism but more likely reflect the Chinese artists’ fascination with the figures in European engravings (see figures 3.11 and 3.12). More recently another very odd figure painting has come to light, also anonymous, that displays more or less the same figure style (figure 3.17); it has been given the title The Whipping. On the one hand, it has even more obvious affinities with the works of Cui Zizhong (figure 3.18)—the hunched, spread-legged postures of the boy, the hiding of the lower face behind the raised shoulder, the exaggeratedly dramatic gestures, the heavily shaded folds of the bulky clothing. On the other hand, it exhibits features that relate it to the works we have just been considering, such as the house in the background with a moon window, drawn so as to show the thickness of the wall, through which a table can be seen. The narrative subject, in an exaggeratedly dramatic treatment—presumably illustrating an incident from some drama or story, still unidentified—also suggests an artist of our urban professional type. It may be one panel from a series, perhaps a screen. It is reasonable to suppose that the style represented by the Freer album of arhats and The Whipping but in a somewhat later and less bizarre form, was brought into the Imperial Academy in the Kangxi period by Jiao Bingzhen and Leng Mei, and was there transformed gradually into a more polished and elegant mode, better suited to the needs and taste of the court.47 From that to the far more relaxed and naturalistic, though no less polished, range of styles used by northern, particularly Beijing-area, figure masters from about the second quarter of the eighteenth century— that is, to the still hazily defined but coherent and highly important body of painting that includes some of the finest works in this book—is a larger leap. Nevertheless, it is one that must be attempted, even with some aspects of it still left unclear and no claims made for an art-historical charting that is more than provisional. From scant evidence, this later northern style would appear to have taken form more outside the imperial court than inside, although the two spheres of production were always closely in touch, and artists could move between them. Outside,

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3.17 Anonymous (perhaps late seventeenth century), The Whipping. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 102 x 37.3 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, gift of Harold Hugo (1980.92).

3.18 Cui Zizhong (1590s–1644), Sweeping the Elephant. Detail from a hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 152.5 x 49.4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China.

we can conjecture (again, with a few clues), patronage came from wealthy and powerful patrons of several categories, beginning with the Manchu nobility. Many imperial princes, sons and grandsons of the emperor, lived within the Forbidden City, and many others, mostly those of the emperor’s generation and older, lived in lavish style with their large households in imperial villas northwest of Beijing, and in the imperial gardens, the Changchun Yuan and Yuanming Yuan.48 These, along with well-to-do and powerful Manchu officials and Qing bannermen families living in the Beijing area, must have made up a rich community of consumers for this growing output of technically finished, relatively naturalistic painting, which suited their aristocratic tastes, and which was too time-consuming and technically demanding to be within the reach of commoners. On the other hand, some of the pictures, judging from their sizes and subjects, may have been done for public display in restaurants, teashops or wine shops, and brothels, prosperous enterprises that could afford to commission them.

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ad o pt i o n s fr o m th e w e st

While the pattern is by no means clear-cut, it would appear that artists who can be shown (by seals on their works and other evidence) to have done paintings for imperial princes are those who worked in the polished, academic styles here under discussion, styles closely related to those of the masters active in the imperial court. Han Chinese officials in the capital, by contrast, seem to have favored those artists working in traditional literati styles, Orthodox-school landscapists but also artists of other kinds from the southern cities who, as described in the previous chapter, came north looking for patronage—Luo Ping is a good example.49 Their paintings, diverse as they might be in subject and style, mostly preserved the traditional literati desiderata of distinctive brushwork and allusions to older styles; they were frequently of modest size and executed on paper; their surfaces were likely to be embellished with artist’s inscription and seals, seals of other owners, and, often, appre­ ciative inscriptions written by the owner or by others at his request. Paintings of the kind I am here calling northern school figure paintings typically display none of these features. In this, as in their adherence to a semi-Westernized version of the academic, professional stylistic tradition stretching back to the Song period, they are like typical works of the artists we have termed urban studio masters working in the Jiangnan or Yangtze delta cities. The resemblance is no accident: the styles and modes of practice of those southern studio masters, as they became known in the north through paintings brought there and painters who moved there, were surely influential in transforming the northern figure style in the direction it took. It can tentatively be understood, then, as partly a continuation of a northern movement or tradition, partly a transplant from the south. Whatever the factors behind this change, figure painting by northern masters from the second quarter of the eighteenth century can be seen to have dropped much of the oddness and foreignness of the northern figure tradition, and presents its subjects and scenes with a new naturalism, humanizing the figures and rendering them expressive, giving them and the objects around them a sense of real presence within clearly readable spaces. A meiren painting of very high quality by Jiao Bingzhen that has recently come to light exemplifies this new manner at an early stage, and reveals, more than any work previously known, what certain later artists who are identified as Jiao’s followers, such as Cui Hui (to be considered below), learned from him (figure 3.19).50 Most immediately striking is its unlikeness to the women in Jiao’s better-known Academy paintings (cf. figures 3.9 and 3.10), with their slim, unarticulated bodies, oval heads, and unworldly demeanor. A clue to understanding the different character of this painting is probably to be found in Jiao Bingzhen’s signature, written small and neat in lower left (and consistent enough with signatures on his other works to support the reliability of this one). It reads, Jiao Bingzhen gonghui (Respectfully painted by Jiao Bingzhen). The absence of the character chen, “your subject,” indicates that the painting was not made for the emperor; the recipient may well have been an imperial prince, for whom the stiffness of the court style, used in works intended for semipublic display, would have been inappropriate and unwelcome. We can also speculate that this is a late work

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3.19 Jiao Bingzhen, Woman Arranging Flowers in a Bronze Pot. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 154.5 x 97.5 cm. Collection unknown. © Christie’s Images Ltd. [2004]. All rights reserved [CHP250404430].

by Jiao Bingzhen, whose death date is unknown but whose period of activity extended until 1726 or after. A consideration of the position of the painting within the genre of meiren hua belongs in chapter 5, as part of a general treatment of that genre. In the present context we need only note the sense of spaciousness, achieved as if effortlessly (in contrast to the more contrived effects seen in Jiao’s works for the court) through the placement of furniture and objects and the figure itself, which, besides creating

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space around and between them, establish the floor plane as firmly as the moon window establishes the farther wall; the relaxed but intent posture and self-absorption of the woman, which carry some sense of an inner life; and the less formal, more descriptive drawing and coloring. All these will be characteristic of the later development of northern figure painting. Also important to the early stage in the formation of this elegantly naturalistic mode of painting was Cui Hui (active ca. 1720s–40s or after), a figure master who has gone nearly unnoticed by historians of Chinese painting. He was a northerner, from Liaoyang in present-day Liaoning Province, but was active in Beijing—one of his works is signed “Beiping Cui Hui.”51 He was probably from a bannerman family; his surname and the term given as his birthplace, Sanhan, suggest that he may have been of Korean ancestry, but the evidence is inconclusive. 52 Several of his paintings are in the Palace Museum, Beijing (one of them, an album of bird-andflower paintings, dated 1721), and in the Tianjin Municipal Museum. There is no record of his having worked at court, though he is said to have studied painting under Jiao Bingzhen; he must have known Leng Mei. At some stage in his career he held an official post, and so must have been an educated man, but he wrote no lengthy inscriptions on any of his paintings. 53 From Cui’s hand are three of the most original and moving images of women we have from late-period China: an imaginary portrait of the twelfth-century poet Li Qingzhao (1084–ca. 1151; figure 3.20), a painting of a woman in a garden pavilion in autumn, awaiting the return of her husband, based on a Li Qingzhao poem (see figure 3.21), and an imaginary portrait of the fictitious poet-heroine Xiaoqing (see figure 3.22). Li Qingzhao is recognized as China’s greatest female poet. A woman of high literacy and cultivated mind, she collected books, paintings, and antiquities together with her scholar-official husband. The fall of the Northern Song to the Jurchens in 1126 and the death of her husband soon after left her alone and impoverished; she settled in the new Southern Song capital, Hangzhou, and there led a much-reduced life. Her poems, about fifty of which survive, tell of personal experiences, many of them the aesthetic pleasures she enjoyed with her husband, others her sorrows as a widow. In Cui Hui’s imaginary portrait, she has just risen from her desk, where she has been reading, and draws back the chair, pointing to it, inviting the visitor— perhaps a fellow poet—to sit down. Although the composition shares some features with women-in-doorways and other pictures of the woman-waiting category, it does not fit into that or any other type; by locating the figure centrally and in the middle distance, the artist dissociates her from all the implications of such pictures. The opening back through the moon window is not into a constricted space, a farther room or a garden, but onto an expansive view over a lake or river, of which a glimpse of the distant shore appears in upper right. The spare furnishings, the rootwood stand and bronze bird-shaped censer, testify to the woman’s austere and antiquarian taste; the censer, because it appears also in her poetry, helps to identify the figure as Li Qingzhao. Her posture (marred a bit for Western viewers by the artist’s failure to locate the woman’s lower body behind the desk instead of under it) projects an

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3.20 Cui Hui (active ca. 1720s–40s or after), Imaginary Portrait of Li Qing­ zhao. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk. 130 x 59.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

i­ mpression of poise and dignity, enhanced by the cool elegance of her pale green blouse and blue vest with embroidered collar and jade clasp. The style is correspondingly formal and precise. Lingerings of Western-derived techniques underlie the lucid spatial scheme and the depiction of furniture and architecture, but they are not at all intrusive, having been absorbed into a Chinese mode within which the artist seems entirely comfortable. The painting is uninscribed; two small seals of the artist are impressed at mid-left. It is as if he, too, did not want to intrude. Cui Hui’s Lady in a Garden Pavilion (figure 3.21) is based on a poem by Li Qingzhao in which a woman is portrayed worrying about her husband, who is far off serving in a frontier garrison; she is concerned over whether he has warm clothes for the cold winter. She has set aside her sewing and sits quietly on the veranda, an empty teacup on the table beside her. A wall cutting diagonally across the lower left removes her from our space; the door in the farther wall may stand for the opening to the outside world through which her husband will eventually come. She does not watch the door, but looks out pensively into the garden with an expression of melancholy. Nothing invites us into the composition. Banana leaves, rocks and trees, the bamboo couch and lattice windows, are all portrayed with great finesse; the hand of the artist is nowhere asserted. And yet the style is distinctive enough to allow us to associate a few other works with it, as by or somehow related to Cui Hui, such as a narrative hanging scroll once ascribed to Tang Yin (see figure 4.32). In both of these hanging-scroll paintings Cui Hui, by placing his women in spacious settings that surround them with light and air, allows the feelings generated by their affecting postures and demeanors to resonate and be projected outward. Realism is not to the point here, nor was it the artist’s aim. By drawing on new techniques for visually persuasive spatial renderings, Cui Hui has in effect liberated his imagined women from the constrictions of traditional Chinese styles, giving them room to breathe and move and reveal their particular sensibilities. Handsome as they are, these are not meiren but representatives of other ideal feminine types: the creative literary woman, the patient and devoted wife. The spaces they occupy are feminized without being eroticized. The same is true to a lesser extent of the meiren painting by Jiao Bingzhen (figure 3.19), who is said to have been Cui Hui’s teacher. Although the woman there is seen in her boudoir, she appears absorbed in her quiet occupation and is given space around her; she is not, that is, fixed and fetishized as an object of erotic desire, as many women in other meiren paintings of this time and later were to be (see, e.g., Leng Mei’s of 1724, figure 5.20). This feature of Cui’s and Jiao’s paintings is anticipated in an anonymous album of early Qing date portraying women in domestic settings (see figures 4.26–28). That album will be presented as probably representing a kind of painting done for women consumers, and it is quite possible that Cui Hui’s paintings were similarly made for a female viewership or clientele. A remarkable work by Cui Hui that has recently come to light is another imaginary portrait, this one of a fictitious female poet named Xiaoqing (figure 3.22).54

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3.21 Cui Hui, Lady in a Garden Pavilion. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 14 3 x 79 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

3.22 Cui Hui, Imaginary Portrait of Xiao­ qing. Hanging scroll, ink and colors probably on silk. Collection unknown; image from Artrade, Beijing, auction notice, 2005.

According to the legend, invented by male literati writers to epitomize the romantic and tragic situation of the unappreciated woman writer, Xiaoqing began as a child courtesan in Yangzhou and was taken as a concubine at the age of fifteen by the son of a high official, who brought her back to his home in Hangzhou. 55 There, however, his jealous first wife moved her to a solitary villa on the West Lake and forbade her husband to see her. Xiaoqing languished alone—except, for a time, for a single woman friend—finding solace only in composing poetry, and died of emaciation and neglect when she was only seventeen, after having her portrait painted. The jealous wife tried to destroy all her poetic manuscripts, but a few survived. Xiaoqing’s poignant story, fictitious though it was, inspired an outpouring of literature, including some fifteen plays and numerous “biographies” and tales. A few texts of this kind, written in neat small-standard script, surround the present ­picture. Cui Hui’s painting is brilliantly and uniquely conceived, responding to a degree rare in Chinese figure pictures to the special character and plight of its subject. Xiao­qing is seen composing a poem: what artist has ever caught better the look of someone open-eyed but inwardly absorbed, shutting out the world around her? She reclines in an angular posture that is accentuated by the slightly disheveled folds of her dress, presenting an image altogether devoid of sensuality; she rests her cheek against her hand on the pillow, with her eyebrows raised slightly in melancholy concentration, her mouth slightly pursed. She lies on a veranda overlooking the garden, her real surroundings indicated by the banana palm seen beyond the railing and by stalks of blossoming lotus from the garden pond in a vase on the floor; her imagined escape is pictured in the Song-style landscape, with a tiny figure cross­ ing a bridge, mounted on the screen above her. The power of the whole composition is offset by small refinements that hint at the elegance she should be enjoying: the fine, pale blue design on her outer robe, with a green undergarment showing at wrist and hip; the brocade cover of her couch and the dali shi, patterned marble slabs set in the back and end panels of the couch. We are made to ask again: who was Cui Hui, that he could paint such pictures and remain virtually unknown? Cui Hui’s paintings appear to form part of the background for a still-to-beidentified studio or group of artists that produced some of the finest works of the hypothetical northern school of figure painting, works that are closely related to one another stylistically: a family New Year’s scene (see figures 4.5 and 4.6), a figure group identified as a scene from the drama The Story of the Western Wing (see figure 5.1), a painting of the Buddhist deity Guanyin (see figure 4.29), an exceptionally beautiful meiren painting (see figure 5.8). Although as a group these works are associated with Leng Mei though loose attributions and by Leng’s signature on one of them, they appear to be later than Leng Mei’s time and different in style from his reliable works, more advanced in naturalism and more sophisticated in their modes of portrayal—qualities for which the works of Cui Hui appear to be precursors. The hypothesis advanced in the previous chapter, about a studio established by Leng Mei during his years outside the Academy that continued to flourish, and to develop somewhat independently, after he had returned to the court at the outset of the Qian­

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long era, is one way of accounting for these paintings, but not the only possible one. They would appear to date from around the third quarter of the eighteenth century. This somewhat tenuous outline of northern developments in figure painting in the eighteenth century needs to be put on more solid ground by the further discovery and identification of relevant paintings with reliable signatures or seals of the real artists. As old biases against paintings of this kind lose their force, neglected examples in museum storage closets and minor collections can be brought forth for display and study. The East-West Fusion

It should be clear by now that the best of the artists we are considering employed Western-derived techniques, not like the makers of Suzhou prints for impressions of novelty and exoticism, but for sharply focused, highly refined effects of body and depth within compositions that are themselves subtle and complex in content. Bringing these new devices to bear on their thematic materials permitted the painters to invest their pictures with fresh and telling expressive content. In the process they also accomplished near-seamless joinings of old and new, conservative and familiar Chinese styles with adoptions from foreign ones, and so escaped the traps that opened before artists who chose to follow one or the other alone: academicism and banality if purely conservative, exoticism and an estranging oddness if obtrusively foreign. It should be clear also that the effects on Chinese painting of the huge influx of European pictures in the late Ming and early Qing have generally been misconstrued by recent writers on the subject. These writers have tended to form their conclusions from reading texts without looking sufficiently at the paintings, or have searched out and magnified in importance the relatively inconsequential uses of Italian singlepoint perspective while failing to recognize and credit the real achievements in ­using foreign elements of style that greatly enriched some paintings of this period. The succession of original and creative masters chiefly responsible for those achievements, most of whom have accordingly been assigned positions somewhat peripheral to the “mainstream” of Chinese painting in standard histories, includes Wu Bin, Zhang Hong, Tseng Qing, Cui Zizhong, Gong Xian, Fan Qi, and a number of others—along with the best of the painters we are considering here. Each of these, in his individual way, accomplished the East-West fusion with such finesse that adop­ tions from the West can be missed, especially by those who prefer to do so on the mistaken assumption that some artistic virtue lies in total imperviousness to foreign styles. That assumption, if followed through, would lead to a much-diminished art history: one could similarly argue if one wished, out of nationalistic or anti­ diffusionist or other motives, that imported Chinese paintings had only a negligible effect on the formation of Nanga painting in eighteenth-century Japan, or ukiyo’e prints and printed books on later nineteenth-century French painting, or Chinese and Japanese calligraphy on Abstract Expressionism in mid-twentieth-century America. But accounts that exclude these cross-cultural transplants must be inadequate, since they miss the role that the transplants performed in stimulating some of the most liberating and productive developments in the history of art.

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3.23 Possibly Wang Chengpei (d. ca. 1805), Lady Waiting in a Doorway. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 203 x 112.5 cm. Poem with signature of Wang Chengpei inscribed on the window lattice in the painting. Formerly in the collection of Lucy Bixby. Christie’s auction catalog, June 1, 1989, no. 88.

This chapter will conclude with a look at a remarkable and somewhat mysterious painting, Lady Waiting in a Doorway (figure 3.23), which I know only from its appearance in a 1989 auction catalog. 56 According to the entry there, it is a work by Wang Chengpei, whose signature, with a date corresponding to 1805, follows a poetic inscription written inconspicuously on a door panel at center right. Wang’s inscription, however, does not actually state that he painted the picture, as an artist’s inscription ordinarily would; it is possible that he only inscribed a work by some unknown, perhaps slightly earlier master. Wang Chengpei was a native of Xiuning in Anhui province, took his juren degree in 1747, held an official position in the Board of Military Affairs in the Qianlong era, and lived at least until 1805; a collection of his writings has been published. He was thus not a painter of the urban professional type, but a literatus-official, for whom such a polished, illu­ sionistic style would have been unusual—a circumstance that might seem to support the conjecture that he was only the inscriber, not the artist. On the other hand, Wang Chengpei was noted for figure painting as well as landscape, and a published work by him, a picture of butterflies and flowers, is done similarly in a Westernized­i llusionistic manner. 57 Leaving aside the question of authorship, which cannot be effectively pursued until the painting is available for study in the original, we can treat it for now as an anonymous work. Again according to the catalog entry, the painting is in ink and colors on silk, and is slightly more than two meters high. These material features, and its markedly illusionistic style, place it in a category of which other examples were treated in the previous chapter and still more will be considered in chapter 5, in which the painting—unencumbered by the inscriptions and seals and prominent brushstrokes that would fix the viewer’s attention on its surface—can easily be experienced in imagination as an opening into a farther space. Within this space the woman, her image drawn to a scale proper for her presumed distance from the viewer and rendered as realistically and volumetrically as the new techniques permitted, awaits the return of her husband or lover, with whom the male gazer is invited to identify. When we read in a later chapter of instances in which someone mistakes a meiren painting for a real woman, we should think of paintings like this one. The illusionistic representation is so successful that one cannot be sure, from the reproduction, whether the apparently raised designs on the door at right and the latticework above are really built up somehow from the surface or are only flat, made to stand out by the artist’s persuasive visual trickery. The patterns on the wallpaper and on the brocade mounting of the hanging scroll appear to be virtually indistinguishable from the patterns that these fabrics would exhibit if real. Throughout, the suppression of the painter’s hand, besides giving the work a curiously cool character (for a type that more often has erotic overtones), makes this a Chinese example of the phenomenon that for Western painting is sometimes called, whether in praise or disparagement, erasure, an effect suggesting that the work came into being independently of any human agency. Chinese painters of this kind

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could indulge in “brushwork” only in paintings-within-the-painting, and we find these frequently in pictures by them that are otherwise illusionistically rendered: a Mi-style landscape, perhaps, hanging in an alcove behind the figures who enact the real matter of the picture. The hanging scroll behind the woman here is a literatistyle landscape that might have been painted by some Ming-period scholarly admirer of Ni Zan. But whereas that literatus would have presented it with the prideful implication that “only as a man of great learning and lofty character could I possibly have done this,” our artist inserted it into his picture in an offhand way as part of the decoration, with the air of someone who was not, so to speak, painting it, only representing it. One must look and think twice to realize that the one in fact entails the other. Such a reading of the picture becomes problematic, of course, if it is indeed a work by Wang Chengpei, who was himself a scholar-official. But others of his paintings, as noted above, similarly exhibit quasi-professional and illusionistic techniques, and appear to open the possibility that the present work is indeed by him. We may hope that when it becomes accessible in the original, some of the problems it now raises can be resolved. Meanwhile, compared with the typical lateperiod Orthodox-school landscapes whose production was an ensign of Wang Chengpei’s scholar-official class, the Lady Waiting in a Doorway can be seen as a far more impressive and engaging achievement.

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four

The Artists’ Repertories A simple observation about Chinese painters, which will arise from even a casual survey of the oeuvres of a representative sampling of them, is that the subject reper­ tories of the professional masters tended to be broad, those of the scholar-amateurs narrow. Masters of the Song Academy, such as Ma Yuan and Ma Lin, who are best known for landscapes with buildings and figures, could also paint excellent histor­ ical figures, religious images, and birds-and-flowers. Ming artists such as Du Jin, Zhou Chen, Qiu Ying, and Tang Yin continued this pattern of thematic breadth, be­ sides accruing another kind of versatility: the capacity to move with equal ease through a diversity of styles. Amateurs such as Ni Zan and Dong Qichang, by contrast, took pride in depicting nothing but “pure” landscape, along with (especially in Ni’s case) ink bamboo. Other literati painters, such as Shen Zhou, were artists of wider thematic scope, but still notably less so than their studio-artist contemporaries. The amateur pattern of narrowness culminates, perhaps, in Zheng Xie (1693–1765), the Yangzhou Eccentric who painted only bamboo, orchids, and rocks in a more or less unvarying style. He can be contrasted with his contemporaries Hua Yan (1682–1756) and Luo Ping (1733–99), both of whom practiced the amateur styles in some of their work and are similarly numbered among the Eccentric Masters of Yangzhou, but

who were serious and versatile vocational artists, painting in response to diverse demands from patronage and the market. For many of the paintings of professional studio artists considered here, difficulties in determining authorship, and even in recognizing individual hands, hamper any effort to define the breadth of particular painters’ repertories. Many of them also bear misleading attributions and false signatures that have led to their dismissal as forgeries. Those few artists for whom enough signed or safely attributable work survives, however, display a thematic variety comparable to that of Qiu Ying and other earlier professional masters. The earliest of them, Gu Jianlong (1606–88 or after), judging only from his works introduced in this book, can be seen to have depicted family groups in architectural settings, meiren, and narrative and erotic albums. Elsewhere he can be observed producing birthday pictures, portraits of rulers and officials (the album commissioned by Qian Qianyi, see chapter 2, “Painters Who Moved between Cities and Court”), and a number of other extant portraits.1 Gu Jianlong, then, emerges in our investigation as a pivotal figure—not only because the body of work by or ascribed to him is consistently original and interesting, but also because it is the first to represent, and in part define, the output of the urban professional masters of the Qing. Building on a tradition that was in decline, the Qiu Ying–Tang Yin styles and repertory as continued by minor masters and the makers of Suzhou pian, Gu began to turn this weakened heritage to the special needs and desires of a new clientele. These were the prosperous people for whom Wen Zhenheng wrote his Zhangwu Zhi (Superfluous Things), people eager to acquire high-quality paintings to hang in their houses for certain uses and occasions. Gu’s oeuvre, seen broadly to include some works attributable by style, encompasses most of the types that the later artists of this group were to practice. Versatile as they were, however, these artists accepted boundaries of their own. They generally avoided essaying the subjects and styles associated with the scholar-amateurs: pure landscape, bamboo and blossoming plum branches, and the like. These types were certainly not beyond their competence, as is amply demonstrated by the numerous examples of paintings-within-paintings to be seen in their works, meticulously executed as screens, wall panels, or hanging scrolls. These miniature pictures are often pure landscapes or other types in which the literati masters specialized, and are done with an unpretentious ease that belies the critics’ insistence on high-minded cultivation as prerequisite for practicing such styles. Moreover, as noted in chapter 1, Gu Jianlong’s mogu fenben (study sketches after old paintings) album shows him reproducing the styles of literati artists of the past at least as capably as his contemporaries Wang Shimin and Wang Jian could do. Whether Gu could, or did, produce original work in the literati styles is moot: his clientele, if they wanted a painting of that kind, would have gone to a man of rank and social station for whom such painting was a “natural” expression, not to a full-time professional painter.

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Although artists of the kind we are considering may have had specialities—for instance, Shi Pangzi who specialized in meiren pictures and portraits of women of the pleasure quarter—there appears to have been no rigid boundary between their painting for domestic uses on the one hand, and for entertainment and erotic stimulation on the other. The artists moved as smoothly between household and brothel as did the characters in Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase, in David Roy’s rendering) 2 or those in the fiction of Li Yu—or, for that matter, their real-life counterparts. For men of sufficient means, and for women of the courtesan-concubine class, this kind of mobility was quite acceptable and even expected. A speciality of the urban-professional artists was group figure paintings intended for presentation and display on auspicious family occasions: weddings, New Year’s celebrations, birthdays of older members (especially sixtieth, seventieth, and eightieth birthdays). These belong to the category of jiaqing tu (family auspicious pictures) mentioned already by the twelfth-century writer Deng Chun as one of the types of paintings that his father had seen among the works of Imperial Academy artists while he was serving at court. 3 The eleventh-century literatus and critic Mi Fu uses another term, shi’hua (occasional paintings), in more or less the same meaning.4 The same author, in his Hua Shi (History of Painting, really a collection of notes on older artists and paintings), writes of works that are “suited only for hanging in a tea house” or for “hanging when you are marrying off a daughter.” 5 We have taken these pronouncements simply as scornful dismissals of the paintings, and they were indeed so intended; but they also testify to the early production of pictures for these and no doubt many other uses, functional works that did not find their way into the corpus of critically approved art suitable for collectors to acquire. The paintings might be commissioned by members of the family, or by some outsider who wanted, perhaps, to felicitate an important person being honored. Presenting paintings of this sort on festive occasions was an especially popular custom in the Qing period, and such paintings made up a significant part of the output of artists.6 Family Occasions

New Year’s

Although Song paintings survive that may have been done for presentation and hanging on New Year’s and birthdays, I know of none depicting a family or group scene. An example of Yuan or early Ming date in the Freer Gallery of Art, however, is closely in the Southern Song Academy style; it might well be a copy after such a work, and may represent our best approximation to the kind of imperial jiaqing tu that Deng Chun’s father saw (figure 4.1).7 It is an evening scene set in a building of the palace, where imperial consorts or concubines and their maids and children celebrate the New Year’s holiday. Some are eating sweetmeats and drinking at a table, joining others in watching a younger woman outside who is very cautiously setting off a small firecracker (see detail, figure 4.2). Two children nearby hold their hands over their ears. Inside, a maid is hanging a picture of the demon queller

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4.1 Anonymous (thirteenth or fourteenth century), Palace Women and Chil­ dren Celebrating the New Year. Hanging scroll mounted on panel, ink and colors on silk, 160.3 x 106.2 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.403.

4.2 Anonymous, Palace Women and Chil­ dren Celebrating the New Year. Detail of figure 4.1.

4.3 Anonymous (late Ming or early Qing period), A Family Celebrating New Year’s. Detail of figure 1.2. Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

Zhong Kui while another provides light with a candle. The rich colors and gold patterns of the costumes set against the dusk give the picture a subdued elegance. An especially fine example of this type, depicting a family New Year’s celebration, is a horizontal painting formerly attributed to Qiu Ying that was first seen in chapter 1 (figure 4.3 is a detail of figure 1.2). Although stylistically it exhibits little that is distinctive (the Chinese writer of a catalog entry on it calls it a Suzhou pian),8 some features link it to the paintings of our concern—the representation of the richly furnished interior, the style of the furniture, the shaded cylindrical pillars. And it may date from the late seventeenth century, or perhaps the eighteenth: the active children in it resemble those in another New Year’s picture that will be introduced below (see figures 4.5 and 4.6). To deal adequately with the imagery of the paint­ing, identifying all the meticulously depicted things the children are holding and doing and their role in the iconography of New Year’s celebrations, would require a substantial essay, and one perhaps best written by a cultural anthropologist. In the section shown in our detail, the patriarch and matriarch of the family are seen at the entrance to the house, watching the celebration. Children around them, all boys, make festive noises with drum, cymbals, and flute; one holds a Buddha mask in front of his face. The crowd of children in the yard tease a lion (occupied by two of their number), form a dragon, play kick-ball, blow a trumpet. Outside the gate are others, one of them lighting a firecracker. Because of the false attribution to

Qiu Ying, the traditional connoisseur or museum curator catalogues such a paint­ ing as a forgery and forgets it, or calls it “academic” and feels he has disposed of it. But works of high quality and interest are sometimes found among paintings of this kind, and they merit recognition quite apart from the information they supply to social historians and specialists in Chinese material culture. This one came to light by chance during the preparation of an exhibition aimed at displaying paintings of neglected kinds, and was published in the catalog. Like so many others in this book, it can represent a type of which most examples are lost or, if extant, unpublished. New Year’s pictures from the late Ming period, which were among the specialities of such Suzhou masters as Li Shida (ca. 1540–after 1620) and Yuan Shangtong (1570–1661), had usually offered conventional compositions centered on houses inside which old men, paying New Year’s visits to one another, are seen drinking and keeping warm, while children in the foreground courtyard set off firecrackers.9 Like meiren pictures, then, New Year’s scenes began in the Ming with their subjects located mostly outdoors, and then moved indoors in the Qing. In the later examples the figure groups in interiors are shown closer up and given greater prominence and specificity. A painting by the early eighteenth-century Yangzhou artist Yan Yi (1666–after 1749) can be seen as transitional (figure 4.4). Here, two scholarofficials have brought their sons to pay New Year’s respects to the grandparents, who warm themselves around a brazier. Plum branches in an antique bronze vase, tall pines, and a crane reinforce the auspicious seasonal message. An especially fine example from the mid-eighteenth century or slightly later is a large painting that is likely to be the work of one of those artists we are calling northern figure masters (figure 4.5). It represents a prosperous household, centered on the disproportionately large figure of the father, who sits on a terrace of their mansion, which opens onto the garden, receiving the felicitations of his family at New Year’s. (The occasion is made clear by the small boy in the foreground setting off a firecracker.) The man’s cap identifies him as an official. To the right are five of his sons, wearing similar caps that presumably prefigure their own careers and bringing auspicious gifts of pine, bamboo, plum, and fungus to felicitate him on the holiday; at the left (see detail, figure 4.6), his wives and concubines look after the smaller children. This is most likely a generic picture for hanging on the appropriate occasion, not a portrayal of any particular family; it represents the blessings of prosperity, stability, many sons and concubines. Despite the “Leng Mei” signature at lower left, the style of the work inclines me to agree with Yoshiho Yonezawa, who first published the painting in 1956, that the signature is an interpolation and the painting somewhat later than Leng Mei’s time.10 The women do not conform with Leng Mei’s distinctive type, the whole arrangement of the figures and their individual postures are more complex and natural than in any reliable Leng Mei composition, and some of the faces are subtly expressive, whereas Leng Mei’s are merely pretty. The painting appears to have emerged, that is, from the more sophisticated and urbane world of the professional city artists, and particularly from our hypothetical

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4.4 Yan Yi (1666–after 1749), A Family Celebrating New Year’s. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 189.1 x 105.5 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

4.5 Anonymous (mid-eighteenth century; interpolated signature of Leng Mei), A Family Celebrating New Year’s. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 110.5 x 159.8 cm. London Gallery, Tokyo.

4.6 Anonymous, A Family Celebrating New Year’s. Detail of figure 4.5.

northern school flourishing in Beijing in this period, not from the elegant makebelieve world of the Qing court. The portrayal of the women, in particular, invests them with more dignity and individual character, as well as play of feeling, than Chinese paintings commonly do. We have seen these humanizing qualities anticipated in works by Jiao Bingzhen (done outside the court) and Cui Hui (see figures 3.19–22). The young woman holding up the baby at far left, her face turned mostly away from us, is especially affecting, with her slightly parted lips, her concerned look. Here as elsewhere in paintings of this kind, it is the women and children who are given distinct, though generalized, facial expressions; dignity required the older boys and men to exhibit expressionless faces. Once more we can find an Imperial Academy equivalent, in a huge New Year’s painting of the Qianlong emperor and his consorts and children, a joint work produced and signed in 1738 by six academicians, including Lang Shining, Chen Mei, and the landscapist Tangdai (1673–after 1752; figure 4.7). And once more, it proves to be a stiffer, colder counterpart to pictures by the urban masters, which are imbued with more animation and feeling. In this regard, the court paintings are more like old studio photographs of families and weddings. The constraints under which the Academy artists worked, the demand for high finish and a highly formal presentation, precluded the warmth and intimacy that the city painters, even when doing broadly functional pictures for an unspecified clientele, were frequently able to instill into their works. Court painting has received greater attention on both scholarly and popular levels, in publications and exhibitions, less because of superior quality and interest than because it is relatively accessible, kept mostly in the two palace museums, Beijing and Taipei; because it is easier to study, accompanied as it is by ample and detailed records, whereas the paintings by urban professional masters are scarcely recorded at all; and because general audiences find glamour in any association with the Forbidden City, which may be second only to the Silk Road in popular appeal. This situation is not apt to change quickly, but one can hope for some shift of favor to the output of the city artists and an eventual recognition of their ultimately richer art, which can make most court painting seem by comparison stiff and overdetermined. This point, and the conditions under which the court artists were forced to work, can be illustrated by comparing the 1738 painting with another version, which fortunately survives as well.11 The other is unsigned but appears to have been done by the same, or almost the same, group of artists, and differs slightly in composition (figure 4.8). A reasonable assumption is that it is a first version that was rejected by the emperor, and so was never signed by the artists. But to assume this raises the question of why it was rejected. The answer lies in the differences between the two versions. The unsigned picture, in addition to exhibiting a more illusionistic, Westernized style, with stronger shading and more insistent linear perspective (which works to draw the viewer’s attention away from the emperor, who is placed off-center), is relatively informal and anecdotal: Qianlong looks down at a baby on his lap and strikes a sounding-stone with a mallet to amuse him; the

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4.7 Chen Mei (active 1700s–40s), Lang Shining (1688–1766), et al., Qianlong and His Family Celebrating New Year’s. Dated 1738. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 289.5 x 196.7 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

4.8 Possibly the same artists as figure 4.7 but unsigned, Qianlong and His Family Celebrating New Year’s. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 277.7 x 160.2 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

children and women appear more individualized and stand in easier postures; and food and drink are more in evidence. The engaging detail of the princelings making a snow lion, on the other hand, is missing from this version. Such a pairing reveals, I believe, the emperor’s preferences—in this case, apparently, for a cooler, more formal picture, less Westernized in style, centered unambiguously on himself. It also helps to explain the stiffness that inevitably beset court painting. Yang Boda writes about the system by which a preliminary version of a court painting had to be prepared and approved before the artists could proceed with a final version; pictures that included the “imperial visage,” a portrait of the emperor or a member of his family, were especially closely controlled.12 But he also tells of how, three years after the 1738 painting, three of the same artists—Lang Shining, Chen Mei, and Tangdai— were given the order to paint a similar picture without being required to do a preliminary version.13 Yang sees this as an expression of confidence in the three painters; it can also be suggested that by then, if our reading of the earlier paintings is right, they had learned their lesson.

Even while admiring the striking skills and sensitivities exhibited by the artists of the two urban-type family scenes (figures 4.3, 4.5–6), we must grant that that qualitative level was not sustained in all studio works of the genre; others are distinctly stiffer and more formal. An example signed by Leng Mei but perhaps in some part a studio work can illustrate the more modest level of production (figure 4.9). It probably represents the Lantern Festival, held on the last day of the New Year’s season. It might have been presented on that occasion to congratulate a man on his advanced age, prolificacy, and prosperity. It is often hard to distinguish between New Year’s and birthday pictures, especially since people sometimes celebrated their birthdays at New Year’s. Particularly if the picture centers on a man, it might be apt to either occasion. This one bears, along with Leng Mei’s signature, the title Quanqing Tu (Complete Auspicious Picture—it has been given the title The Garden of Perfect Celebration), and follows the pattern of placing the man in an open porch of his house and assembling his wives and children (mostly sons) around him, along with such emblems of longevity as the blossoming plum tree, the ruyi scepter, and a branch bearing peaches. The architecture and trees are skillfully drawn, but the mannered postures of the figures and their vacuously smiling faces seem to betray a lesser hand.14 The disparity in quality among the paintings in this section suggests that alongside the high-level output directed at rich and powerful clients, paintings of this kind were also produced more copiously and no doubt repetitively by lesser artists, or studio assistants of major artists, to supply increasing numbers of well-off families who needed them for hanging or presentation on these special occasions. Just how formulaic such pictures could become cannot be determined until enough of them have been assembled and compared. The best paintings of the group, however— even though they were studio works by masters who necessarily kept up a prolific output—do not betray the less-than-ideal circumstances of their creation in any deadness of drawing or banality of conception. To combine these virtues with thematic versatility, as the best painters did, is all the more remarkable. The large family scene with a Leng Mei signature (figures 4.5 and 4.6) belongs to the group of northern school works discussed briefly in chapter 3 (“A ‘Northern School’ of Figure and Figure-in-Landscape Painting?”), pictures of different subjects so close in style that they would appear to have originated in the same atelier. A painting of the Whiterobed Guanyin in the same distinctive style will be introduced below (see figure 4.29), and in the next chapter two more: a large painting said to portray the three principals of the drama The Story of the Western Wing (see figure 5.1), and a painting of a beautiful woman in her boudoir (see figure 5.7). The differences among all these paintings have to do with function and how the picture was to be read by its viewers: the Western Wing scene, for instance, is more generalized or fictionalized than the family scene, and is not presented as if it were a real event; the faces are dreamy, even a bit empty. In both the family and the Western Wing scenes the principal male figure is located at the center and drawn larger than the other participants;

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4.9 Leng Mei (ca. 1670–1742 or after) or a close follower, The Lantern Festival (The Garden of Perfect Celebration). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 149.9 x 99.1 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, gift of Mrs. James L. Magrish, accession no. 1953.149.

the family scene, typically for this genre, closes the picture space behind the main figures, whereas in the Western Wing picture a moon door opens into another luxuriously furnished room, which in turn opens into a garden, for an effect of deep penetration in keeping with its erotic theme. The New Year’s picture was surely used as an auspicious decoration in some large hall where the family gathered to celebrate that holiday; but the Western Wing scene raises once more the question of where and when it would have been hung—a question to which we will return.

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Birthdays

Paintings designed to be presented to people on their birthdays or hung at birthday celebrations make up a large category within Chinese functional paintings. Familiar types—pictures of pine trees, fungus, and cranes, all symbolic of longevity,15 or of the God of Old Age—have received some scholarly attention.16 Paintings of the popular goddess Magu were hung on the occasion of parties for women’s birthdays; an example by Leng Mei can be seen in figure 2.20, and Gu Jianlong is known to have painted one as early as 1632.17 A group subject known as the San Xing (Three Stars) joined the God of Old Age (Shoulao Xing) together with the gods of good fortune (Fu) and emolument (Lu) to convey a threefold wish for blessings.18 All these paintings belong among the “vulgar” types well represented in the Yan Song inventory and Wen Zhenheng’s calendar for scroll-hanging cited in chapter 1 (after note 20). Many pictures of this kind are indeed repetitious and banal, but some are original and attractive, notwithstanding their commonplace theme. Such a one is The Three Stars by Zhao Wei, an early Qing figure specialist from the Shaoxing region in Zhejiang (figure 4.10). Judging from the style, he must have been a follower of the greatest figure master of the late period, Chen Hongshou (1598–1652), who had been active in that region only decades earlier. The artist has written on the painting the title Duo Fu (Abundant Good Fortune). It represents the three monumental-looking gods among beautiful female attendants, with the God of Old Age in the foreground reading a scroll (the birthday celebrant’s fate?) and before him two women holding gifts, one a peony in a vase and the other a red pill, presumably a long-life elixir. The Star of Emolument holds in his arms a young boy, who represents, as in other birthday pictures, the wish for male heirs who will become officials and further advance the family. The slightly bizarre geometricizing of the costumes and even the faces belongs to the distinctive style of Chen Hong­ shou, and gives the whole work a pleasantly patterned look. More elaborate birthday paintings might represent Mount Penglai or another of the Three Isles of Immortals in the eastern sea—three mythical islands supposedly located off the east coast of China, where Daoist Immortals or Transcendents, who had sublimed away all the earthy parts of their beings, were carried on the wings of cranes—birds that accordingly are also often seen in birthday pictures. Others represent Xiwangmu, Queen Mother of the West, another Daoist popular deity who presided over a realm believed to be located far to the west of China. In her garden grew the Peaches of Immortality—to eat one was to live forever. A large, grandiose picture of Xiwangmu’s court by Yu Zhiding is known.19 Or they could follow the common formula for New Year’s pictures: a family scene centered on the paterfamilias, whose birthday it was, only eliminating the markers for that holiday (such as lighting a firecracker) and emphasizing his male progeny. One following that pattern bears the signature of Xie Sui, an artist active in the Qianlong Academy who, like Leng Mei, also worked outside it (figure 4.11). Nothing is known of his birthplace; he may have been another northerner. His dated works fall between 1761 and

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4.10 Zhao Wei, The Three Stars. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 165 x 101 cm. Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

4.11 Xie Sui (active ca. 1761–87), A Gentle­ man Celebrating His Birthday. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 156.5 x 114 cm. Bunzo Nakanishi Collection, Kyoto.

1787.20 He is best known as the artist of a long ethnographical handscroll depicting peoples of foreign countries, but he could also paint an Orthodox-style landscape within the Academy, and, if the signature is to be believed, a family birthday celebration picture such as this one outside it.21 Whatever its authorship, it is a handsome and accomplished work, which manages to credit the calm-looking father (and his wives and concubines) with no fewer than eighteen male children, all young. Its resemblance to the “Leng Mei” family New Year’s scene (figures 4.5 and 4.6) points up the difficulty of distinguishing between the two types—even the identifications made here are not entirely firm. Paintings done for family observances, of the kind that were produced by urban professional artists, seem to have been among the specialities of Leng Mei during his out-of-court period, 1723–35. Two signed works by him, undated but presumably from that period, can represent them. One, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, must have been intended for presentation and hanging at a gentlewoman’s

birthday celebration (figure 4.12). She sits on a terrace outside her house surrounded by her children, four sons and two daughters. One of the sons brings her lingzhi fungus in a vase, another a pomegranate, another stalks of fragrant guihua (cassia), and the younger daughter holds a plate with a peach and a pomegranate. The fungus, peach, and guihua stand for longevity, the pomegranates for a wish, already granted, for multiple sons. Since Leng Mei did not write a dedication on the picture, we cannot be sure whether it was done on commission or was only a generic birthday painting, to be acquired by anyone whose needs it suited. But the lack of any portraitlike specificity in the woman’s face makes the latter more likely.

Weddings and Marriage Celebrations

The other signed work by Leng Mei seems from its inscription to felicitate a couple on their happy marriage, their prosperity, and their progeny (figure 4.13). Written by a certain Cheng Liang of Huating and dated to 1741 (it could have been added some years after the painting was done), the inscription reads, Two flowers blossom on a single stem, their fragrance subtle, Together they enjoy waving the fan, and the colors spread. Their wishes in accord, happy to tie the ribbon that binds two hearts, They gaze from time to time at the ruyi scepter, taking satisfaction in writing.

The painting portrays the married couple surrounded by their children, four daughters and two sons, in an interior setting. Two of the girls stand by their mother’s chair, the others by the father’s kang (couch-bed). Peaches and pomegranates are again in evidence. The father, wearing a scholar-official’s cap and girdle, holds a ruyi scepter; the older son presents to his mother a jade sounding-stone, another symbol of harmony, while the younger one reaches for a book on the table, a gesture indicating his scholarly bent and forecasting that he, like his father, will become a scholar-official. As to the occasion on which such a painting would have been presented or hung, the six children would seem to preclude a wedding, unless the painting expressed an auspicious wish—that is, was intended to predict, and in some sense to participate in bringing about, the prosperity and progeny portrayed. Alternatively, the painting may have been presented at a celebration of a long and happy marriage. Whether there was any such custom in China is a question for social historians; I know of no evidence for it. More commonly seen are wedding pictures featuring pairs of mandarin ducks, emblems of marital harmony, sometimes with the addition of other paired birds and auspicious imagery.22 Pictures of the goddess Magu, besides being suited to women’s birthdays, might be given to couples on their silver and golden wedding anniversaries.23

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4.12 Leng Mei, A Gentlewoman Celebrat­ ing Her Birthday. Hanging scroll, ink, colors, and gold on silk, 114.8 x 58.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Julia Bradford Huntington James Fund, 08.107. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

4.13 Leng Mei, A Happy Couple and Their Family. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 46.6 x 35.7 cm. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon.

Family Group Portraits and Scenes of Family Life

A category of painting related to the family celebration pictures is the family group portrait, which differs from the generalized scenes both in particularizing the setting—making the house or villa recognizable to those familiar with the real place— and in inserting portraits of real people in place of the idealized or generic ones. The earliest example known to me is Gu Jianlong’s group portrait of Wang Shimin and His Family at Home (figure 4.14). It was probably painted sometime between Gu’s return from his service at court in the late 1670s and Wang’s death in 1680. Once again we find Gu Jianlong as the unpretentious innovator among our artists, inventing new types and transforming old ones without (as some of the literati painters did) writing long inscriptions to trumpet his achievements.24 Measuring over a foot in height and nearly four feet in length, the composition seems designed, more than is usual with handscrolls, to be seen all at once; an overall view of the spatial layout of the rooms conveys the interrelationships of the figures within them as sequential presentation could not. Like the pictures intended for male birthdays, this one portrays Wang as the father of sons. He had no fewer than nine of them, and seven appear in the picture: one standing beside him in his ground-floor study, three in an adjoining room, the youngest with a servant on the veranda at left, and two more upstairs with his wife, their nanny (or possibly grandmother), and a concubine who is seen through a bamboo blind, a nice compromise between being given unacceptably equal status with the first wife and being left out altogether. Assuming that Wang also had daughters (and Chinese sources are typically silent on

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4.14 Gu Jianlong (1606–88 or after), Wang Shimin and His Family at Home. Handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 35.24 x 119.7 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, gift of Ruth and Bruce Dayton.

the matter), and if they appear in the picture at all, they are the two young women in the farther upstairs room, standing beside a table piled with large jars and other containers; but these might also be servants. The women’s quarters are not only elevated but also set back beyond a courtyard, past conventional, distancing clouds. Farther distant and to the left, directly above Wang Shimin, is a glimpse of what appears to be his library. Wang Shimin sits in a casual pose, clad in a loose robe, comfortably surrounded by books and brushes and progeny, gazing out at us with a contented smile. His is the most distinctive, portraitlike face in the picture; the degree of individualization among the others is one more index of their position within the family hierarchy. How far all this differentiation reflects the insights of the artist—who was, as we have seen, Wang’s longtime friend—and how far the wishes of his client, expressed or assumed, is another unanswerable question; no inscriptions remain with the painting, apart from Gu Jianlong’s signature. Some hardness in the drawing and unsubtlety of coloring suggest that other hands than Gu’s might have been responsible for parts of the picture; such a work may have been done in multiples, as a studio production, so that various family members could have their own copies, which may not all have been furnished with sets of inscriptions. A painting that is probably a fragment preserved from a large composition, presumably another family group portrait but in hanging-scroll form, appears to be by Gu Jianlong or some studio follower (figure 4.15). Similarities to the Wang

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Shimin scroll—for instance, the combination of a broad-leafed (tong) tree with knotty trunk and a shorter tree (perhaps a cassia) with small green leaves and white flowers, as well as the style of the portrait itself—establish the close relationship of the two works. The drawing in the smaller one, however, is more sensitive and seemingly firsthand, indicating that it might be by Gu Jianlong himself. Its subject is a studious little boy, the hope of every family because he gives promise of growing up to be a scholar-official and a source of status and wealth, who looks out at us through a moon window, wearing a scholar’s robe and holding a book. His head is disproportionately large, and his solemn face appears mature beyond his years. Chinese painting offers numerous examples of happy children at play; this one, along with some others reproduced in this chapter, suggests the burden of the male child whose fortunate birth into an upper-class family meant that an oppressively large portion of his childhood and early manhood would be spent studying the classics. A special type of multiple-image portrait of a man and his family, in handscroll or album form, portrays him in a series of scenes depicting typical or characterizing episodes in his life, thus ascribing to him the virtues exemplified by those scenes. An example painted in 1648, a joint work by Lan Ying and the portraitist Xie Bin in handscroll form, has been published, and others are known.25 In 1730 Leng Mei, during his period outside the Academy, painted a twelve-leaf album titled Illustra­ tions to a Farmer Family’s Life that appears to be a work of this type, in which the assumed recipient is depicted as a prosperous farmer tending his estate, supervis-

4.15 Gu Jianlong or follower, A Boy in His Study. Possibly a fragment of a larger painting, ink and colors on silk, 42.5 x 62.5 cm. Collection of the late Royle B. Jackson, Sacramento, California. Photo: J. Jackson.

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4.16 Anonymous (eighteenth century), A Landlord-Official Meeting Petitioners on His Estate. Leaf 3 from a fourteenleaf album, ink and colors on silk, 36.5 x 44 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Ward, New York. Photo: Stefan Hagen, New York.

ing his workers, and enjoying life with his family.26 A fourteen-leaf example is unsigned and has no accompanying documentation; it appears to date from about the same time as Leng Mei’s album, the early to mid-eighteenth century (figure 4.16). In its successive leaves the landowner is portrayed seated formally with his family, playing a card game with his sons, sitting in his garden gazing at potted plants, traveling on horseback and by boat, and in various other roles. The leaf reproduced here is another idealized imagining of a recurring episode in his life: he sits in an open shed looking out onto a rustic yard, where his petitioners have come to present their grievances or needs and seek his benevolent help. Beyond the vine-grown wall, a man is seen leading his blind father across a bridge; the supplicants inside the yard are peasants and their families, including several women, a little boy who cries, an old man bent with a cane, and children who have come simply to watch.

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There is no way of knowing how much of this was true to the circumstances of the particular landlord-official for whom the album was painted, and how much belonged to a stock-in-trade series of idealized scenes the artist had ready for commissions of this type he might receive. The effect is of a real incident, detailed and particularized. The same will be true of the scenes in a handscroll to be considered below, showing the sights of the Tiger Hill pleasure district near Suzhou, and of others of this broad type, including some of the family scenes already introduced. An anonymous group portrait of a family in the British Museum also dates probably from the later eighteenth century (figure 4.17). Behind an initial impression of naïveté, it proves to be a work of some sophistication. The two oldest women of the family are placed within the house and a younger woman on the terrace in front of it, accompanied by a boy we may suppose to be one of her children. The male family members, shown outdoors, display different degrees of mobility in their placement and postures: the two sons pose on rocks in the foreground, accompanied by children, presumably their sons; the oldest of the males, probably the father, has ventured out (as seen in upper right) with a boy servant (or maybe a grandson) to gather herbs. The whole conception and execution of the picture suggest that it probably belonged to a common type made by provincial portraitists for local families. Assembled and sensitively read, a series of such pictures (and others must survive, unpublished as was this one) could supplement what written sources reveal about the dynamics of domestic relationships in late-period China. An especially fine and extensive group portrait of a family in their villa is a handscroll in the Tianjin Art Museum, published hitherto only in a small, unclear blackand-white reproduction; I offer two sections in color (see figures 4.18 and 4.19). Two small seals at the end of the scroll may provide the name of the artist, a certain Zhang Yin who has not been identified, but from his style would appear to have been active in the mid- or later eighteenth century. It is a complex and visually splendid portrayal of members of a rich family and their servants set within the lovingly depicted garden and buildings of their residence. Compositionally it follows a wellestablished model for garden paintings in handscroll form, in which the viewer enters the garden through an opening in a wall at the beginning, moves through a succession of spaces within which the prominent features of the place are presented, passes the living quarters of the family, and exits through an opening in another wall at the end. As in the other family group portraits we have seen, the family hierarchy is carefully reflected in the arrangement of members within the painting. The males are introduced first and located outdoors, with implications of freedom of movement. The father or patriarch, a bearded figure, is seen prominently near the beginning of the scroll sitting on a kang platform-seat in his garden, surrounded by his servants (figure 4.18). In the central passage that follows we look over a lotus pond on which four younger males, presumably his sons, are boating, while another— perhaps the eldest—fishes from a porch on its farther bank. Behind him a woman, probably his wife, takes tea from a servant. Piles of books in cases on a table farther inside indicate, as usual, his advanced level of education. From there we move on

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4.17 Anonymous (eighteenth century), Group Portrait: A Family outside Their House. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 134.4 x 82 cm. The British Museum, London. © The Trustees of The British Museum.

4.18 and 4.19 Zhang Yin (perhaps eighteenth century), A Family in Their Villa. Two details of a handscroll, ink and colors on silk, dimensions unknown. Tianjin Museum.

to the main house, depicted in the finest detail with elaborate latticework and decoratively carved and colored panels (figure 4.19). Banana palms grow in the garden outside, and elegant taihu-shi—stones hollowed by erosion and brought from the shore of the Great Lake near Suzhou to be set up as natural sculptures—are arranged among them, emblems of affluence. The principal wife, a handsome woman of aristocratic mien wearing hair ornaments and a simple brown robe, sits in the entryway of the house, watching with raised eyebrows and pursed lips as a servant waters the potted iris and bonsai or dwarf tree just outside. Two more bonsai and lingzhi fungus grow in shallow containers at the other side of the porch. Another servant brings her tea; two lapdogs play below the steps. Farther on we exit through a moon gate in a wall, ending what has been presented as a highly privileged passage through a domestic complex usually inaccessible to viewing by outsiders. Paintings of all these types present arranged scenes of families assembled on special occasions, or sitting for their portraits. Where can one find scenes of everyday family life, seemingly unposed, appearing at least to report on how the members of a household spent their days? Some narrative pictures and illustrations to fiction and drama, to be considered below, can serve that function in a limited way; so can the pictures that belong to our still hazily defined category of paintings done for women. Surprisingly enough, however, such scenes are to be found more abundantly in a quite unexpected context, the erotic albums. A new development in the early Qing period is the emergence of a form that I term the part-erotic album, in which leaves with overtly sexual themes are interspersed with others that are simply portrayals of quiet moments and small events, often but not always interactions between male and female members, in the ongoing domestic life of a well-off household.27 Paintings of the latter type are pictorial equivalents of the non-erotic materials in

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Qing-period fiction, and could be mined (with the same caution—they are, of course, fictional) by social historians, feminist historians, and others, just as the fiction has been mined in recent years. A leaf in the album by Xu Mei (figure 2.3), for instance, provides a glimpse of a sexual encounter in a farther room, but the nearer and larger space at right is occupied by women talking animatedly around a table while engaged in some occupation not easily identified. The older, gray-robed woman with a child between her knees appears to be explaining something to the younger woman about an object—a red pill or perhaps a jewel—wrapped in a kerchief on the table between them, while a third woman (maybe the mother) looks on, holding a flower, and two maids serve tea. A number of leaves depicting quiet domestic activities are found in a group of albums that appear to be the work of an unidentified mid-eighteenth-century master who worked in the Qianlong Academy but also outside it; I have called him the Qianlong Albums Master. One is a tender scene in a garden where a man and woman and their small son sit on a woven mat laid under a banana tree to escape the summer heat (figure 4.20). The child’s parasol and drum lie nearby. The mother supports the child, while the father appears to put his hands over the child’s ears and the child reaches his hands toward the father’s face. Perhaps they are playing a game. In another, the woman and man sit quietly in the garden listening to a blind woman play the pipa (lute)—and perhaps sing; her mouth is slightly open (figure 4.21). The woman listener sits with one hand on her own knee, one on her lover’s; he beats time with a fan. Scenes of romantic love in these albums are among the fairly few representations of this theme surviving in Chinese painting, apart from the woodblock-printed illustrations to fiction and drama, and they are all the more valuable for that.

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4.20 Anonymous (third quarter of the eighteenth century), Couple and Child in a Garden. Leaf from a twelveleaf album, ink and colors on silk, each 40 x 36.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Charles Bain Hoyt Fund, 2002.602.1–12. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

4.21 Anonymous, Couple Listening to a Blind Pipa Player. Another leaf from the same album as figure 4.20. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Other, less simply domestic leaves in this album, as in other part-erotic albums, depict situations involving a man and more than one woman. In one leaf the man has just begun painting a flower-and-bird fan—he has drawn only a bird—and pauses while one of the women, maybe his wife, holds up a completed fan for another woman’s admiration (figure 4.22). In still another, the young man sits with three women in the garden, his arm around one of them, watching them play a finger game of the kind played at drinking parties, while a maid keeps time on a drum (figure 4.23). This last composition exists also in a larger, elaborated version, done in the same style and presumably by the same artist, the Qianlong Albums Master (figure 4.24). Though now kept as a separate work and furnished with a false seal of Qiu Ying, it was originally also part of an album of large leaves (indeterminate in number) produced by the Qianlong Albums Master in a court context, perhaps for a princely household, and portraying imagined scenes from the lives of a Han Chinese elite family—the men are wearing scholar-official caps.28 To the simpler picture of the smaller leaf the artist here adds a garden pavilion, mineral-blue rocks, and a profusion of peonies. The scene is relatively decorous and presentable; today, only the academic’s eye (the references must have been patent to the artist’s original viewers) would notice that it is a rhinoceros-horn cup, believed in China to insure male potency, from which the man drinks, holding it in one hand while with the other he turns the face of his companion toward him for a kiss. (Here is one of many picto-

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4.22 Anonymous, Painting Fans. Another leaf from the same album as figure 4.20. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

4.23 Anonymous, A Man and His Concu­ bines in a Garden. Another leaf from the same album as figure 4.20. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

rial answers to the frequent question: did men and women kiss in old China?) And only the art historian, surely, would call attention to the erotically charged imagery of mineral-blue rocks, the peonies in full bloom, and the moon gate constructed of bamboo that opens into a farther courtyard. Like the other paintings of this group, this is a celebration of luxury and stability, but offers in addition the enticements of a delicate eroticism. It is as if one could cross a less garish and elite-glorifying Architectural Digest with a more refined Playboy to present images of both modish living and elegant sexuality, models upon which the viewer could construct the fantasies of his own desires. Other leaves in these albums feature flirtations and seductions, from subtle to blatant, shading smoothly into openly erotic depictions of sexual encounters. Seeming to underlie them all is the assumption that not only polygamy and the keeping of concubines, but the sexual pursuit of other women in the household as well, was permissible for the ranking males. The old ideal of the scholar-beauty romance has expanded, leaving behind its self-imposed rules and moralizing messages, into a whole world of beautiful people, of affluence and power, of easy sex. These views of family life, unlike the ones considered earlier, do not conform to the old Confucian image of the family, but portray a new one, and the difference is important. In the next chapter, we will speculate on what social and economic changes underlay this shift, which took place between the Ming-Qing transition and the mid-eighteenth century.

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Paintings for Women?

Long preceding these middle-Qing family scenes, but still underlying them as an ideal, was a great change that elite and upper-class Chinese society had undergone in the late Ming period, especially in the Jiangnan region. It has been well chronicled by John Meskill as “The New Temper”: “The love of conspicuous comfort . . . marked a shift of attitudes in which the pursuit of pleasure rivalled conventional goals” such as success in the civil-service examinations or the public practice of the old Confucian virtues.29 Victoria Cass builds upon this insight to emphasize the importance of women, especially courtesans (or, as she calls them, geisha), in this redefinition of values: “In the late Ming, especially in the South, the literati became men of the hermitage, of the romantic, and of the intimate. . . . These men of the South spent their energies on the private, not public, life, staying home to work at a life of private passion and a life devoted to the arts.” And she continues, “Geishas were the appropriate partners in this reconfiguration of elite culture . . . through such theories of the romantic and the heroic, the literati and the geisha—as well as the literati and the companionate wife—redefined private life, mystifying the affective just as the Confucian mystified the lineage.” She quotes W. H. Auden on “the creation of utopias [that] are ‘extensions of those moments when we say “What

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4.24 Anonymous (third quarter of the eighteenth century; false seal of Qiu Ying), A Man and His Concubines in a Garden Pavilion. Large album leaf, ink and colors on silk, 54 x 72.5 cm. © Christie’s Images Ltd. [1993]. All rights reserved [CHP301000324].

if . . .” They are life in the subjective mode.’ ”30 The world portrayed in the erotic albums, and in paintings associated with the courtesan culture (which are the subject of chapter 5), represents the artists’ imaginings of how this new aesthetic-erotic way of life might be pursued. The fan-painting leaf (figure 4.22), for instance, envisions a moment in the lives of a man and woman who represent (again in Victoria Cass’s words) “an alliance of passionate aesthetes.”31 Similar moments of shared aesthetic pleasures are recounted in the late Ming literatus Mao Xiang’s memoir of his life with his beloved concubine Dong Xiaowan. 32 But, as Cass also notes, the relationship could also be between the literatus and “the compassionate wife.” The part-erotic albums can best be understood in light of this background. It is no coincidence that the rise of this new type in the hands of Gu Jianlong and his contemporaries, combining explicit pictures of sexual acts with scenes of romantic love and family pleasures, was more or less contemporaneous with the large cultural shift outlined by Meskill and Cass. It also parallels, and must in some part reflect, the change noted near the end of chapter 1 by which amorous and other relationships within the household emerged as a major theme in poetry written by cultivated gentry women, guixiu. Paintings of this kind could have been enjoyed together by such couples. The ideal of romantic love in which the man and woman play their roles as equals, and the literature that embodied it, exerted a strong appeal in the MingQing period to women as well as, perhaps even more than, to men. It is important, then, to raise once more the question, even though we do not yet have much evidence for answering it, of women as “consumers” of paintings, or as audience for them. A substantial body of research and writing has already been done on women in this period as readers of fiction, drama, and poetry. 33 Their enthusiasm in particular for those kinds imbued with qing, a quality centered in romantic love but covering a wider range of feelings (Cass writes “passion, love, feelings, and romance”), is well documented. 34 As was suggested in the introductory chapter, it is a reasonable assumption, backed by some literary evidence, that painting embodying the same complex of feelings held a similar appeal for women. Painted illustrations to fiction and drama of this kind, a few of which will be considered below, would seem obviously to warrant inclusion in the still-hypothetical category of paintings for women, along with some of the family scenes and representations of romantic love considered above. Evidence will be presented in the next chapter that certain kinds of paintings of women were hung by women in their own bedrooms. Still another type, the boundaries of which we can only hazily begin to draw, comprises paintings of women presented as self-sufficient people, occupied in their own affairs, not fetishized as objects of male desire (Cui Hui’s imaginary portraits of Li Qingzhao and Xiaoqing, figures 3.20 and 3.22, are prime examples); and also of pairs and groups of women in relationships more equal and ambiguous than that of mistress and maid. A painting of six women playing cards around a table (figure 4.25) might by itself be taken for a scene in a brothel, and so to belong in the next chapter. But

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4.25 Probably Gu Jianlong (old attribution to Qiu Ying), Women Playing Cards. Ink and colors on silk, 80.1 x 44.4 cm. Former Agata Collection, Osaka. © Christie’s Images Ltd. [2000]. All rights reserved [CHP40693135].

its close correspondence to a leaf in an album by Gu Jianlong establishes both its authorship—it is clearly by the same hand as the album leaf (an old attribution to Qiu Ying can be disregarded), and the screen with meticulously rendered album pictures mounted on it in rows is a common feature in Gu Jianlong’s paintings, seldom seen elsewhere—and its subject, since all the other leaves in that album represent domestic scenes. 35 In this context, the picture can best be read as portraying the wives and concubines of some rich household. The candles indicate nighttime, and a servant is sleeping in the lower left. Four of the women sit around the table with a brocade cover; two others lean over the chairs of the women at right, gazing at the cards they hold and offering advice. The successful projection of an intimate and tranquil moment in the women’s quarters places this painting in the lineage of the Tang and Song masters who specialized in scenes of the leisure occupations of palace ladies—works that also, with their implied identification of the ladies as multiple consorts of the emperor, had delicate erotic resonances that accounted for some part of their popularity. But the absence of any overt eroticization of the women in some of these pictures raises also the possibility that they were done for a clientele that included women. A recently discovered eight-leaf album of paintings of women in interiors engaged in quiet occupations, from which I reproduce three leaves (figures 4.26–28), suggests this possibility even more strongly; the pictures do not appear designed to interest, much less arouse, male viewers. 36 An old attribution to Qiu Ying helps to account for the obscurity in which the album has remained: Chinese collectors would see it simply as a fake, another Suzhou pian. It must in fact be the work of some Suzhou small master of the late Ming or early Qing who was indeed a follower of Qiu Ying. Another reason for the album’s neglect by collectors (paintings of this kind seldom bear collectors’ seals) is that it does not fall into any easily recognizable subject category. No story connects the leaves, nor do they illustrate any text; in this they are like the part-erotic albums that originated in the same place and period. The album offers a prime example, moreover, of the new “low mimetic” mode in painting, and of Susanne Langer’s “passages of ‘felt life,’ ” qualities that were introduced in the first chapter as identifying a new genre in Chinese figure painting. The eight leaves are vignettes from the leisurely lives of upper-class ladies. One is having her hair done by a servant; another has fallen asleep while reading; another gazes, rather mysteriously, at a short sword lying on a table. Several of the leaves include two women who appear, though differentiated in age, to be of more or less equal status, not mistress and servant, and so seem relevant to another topic well studied in recent scholarship of this period: women’s friendships and bonding. In one a seated woman resting her hand on a case of books turns to welcome another, probably a maid (judging from her slightly darker facial color and simpler dress), who approaches carrying a packet of what appear to be scrolls, tied with a red ribbon (figure 4.26). One can imagine them to be scrolls of poetry, and the women as participants in one of the poetry clubs and literary networks that flourished from late Ming on, sometimes within a single scholarly household. 37

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4.26 Anonymous (mid-seventeenth century, old attribution to Qiu Ying), Two Women with Books and Scrolls. From an eight-leaf album of Scenes of Women in Domestic Settings, ink and colors on silk, 30 x 30 cm. Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne (inv. no. A 10.39). Photo: Rheinisches Bild­ archiv, Cologne.

4.27 Anonymous, Woman in a Room, An­ other Outside. Another leaf from the same album as figure 4.26. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne.

Two of the leaves pertain to another shared concern, foot binding. One portrays a woman seated on a garden railing and raising her bound foot as if to exhibit it to her friend seated nearby, who leans over to look more closely. In the other, a woman gazes through a window from the garden at another inside (figure 4.27). 38 The one outside leans on a shelf holding a fan, a bamboo chair behind her; the one indoors, a book beside her, is holding her foot with both hands as if massaging it, perhaps preparing to unwind the cloth binding. 39 The two women smile, as if over some shared private understanding. The space opens back at upper right to the indoor woman’s bedchamber. Whereas many pictures of women in their boudoirs were designed to offer male viewers privileged views into these forbidden spaces, this one has more the effect of making them feel shut out by the subtly drawn rapport between the women. The openness of the composition, moreover, as with other leaves in the album, avoids subjecting the women to any strong sense of confinement, of the kind one feels in some later pictures of women in their boudoirs (cf. figure 5.20). In another leaf the women are seen looking out of a window, the older embracing and fondly regarding the younger, who dangles one hand languidly and gazes at a pair of ducks in the pond outside—a motif that in more usual contexts would stand for connubial happiness (figure 4.28). It is probably not overimagining to detect in these leaves delicate hints of lesbian love, or at least female same-sex attachments that might develop in the absence of husbands and male lovers; but if so, it is presented from the women’s viewpoint, not displayed for the titillation of men, as it is in some erotic album leaves. Female same-sex love was not uncommon in Qing China, and was not especially stigmatized. The widely spaced compositions and precise, sensitive drawing give the pictures a cool elegance even while failing to display the distinctive traits that would identify the style with any particular master.

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4.28 Anonymous, Two Women Looking through a Moon Window. Another leaf from the same album as figure 4.26. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne.

A Seductive Guanyin

As a convenient way of organizing the paintings in this and the following chapter in which women are principal subjects or feature prominently, we might arrange them loosely into three large categories along a continuum stretching from cool to hot. At the cool end are all the kinds discussed in this chapter, for which we can posit a viewership partly, sometimes primarily, made up of women—or we might say simply, to avoid the danger of reductionism, that pictures of these kinds appealed to open sensibilities in a way that transcended gender lines. The meiren paintings of the next chapter exhibit collectively their own cool-to-hot scale, those at the cooler end presumably appealing to women or transcending gender, those at the other end finding their viewers chiefly among lubricious males. And the erotic albums, although some of the milder or mixed examples may well have been enjoyed by women, were mostly made for male viewing, or (if we believe literary and pictorial accounts) for showing to women to arouse them and suggest unfamiliar modes of lovemaking. We will keep this provisional but useful framework in mind as we proceed. In the next chapter we will observe the cool-to-hot scale correlating in a loose way also with changes over time: a sweeping change in the character of meiren paintings proves to be loosely congruent with a great transformation of the courtesan culture, between the period of its flourishing in the Ming-Qing transition and the mid-eighteenth century, when it survives only in a somewhat debased, commer­ cialized form, and as an ideal still resonating behind more mundane realities. One might suppose that however versatile the eighteenth-century professional masters were, their styles and sensibilities would have been unsuited to religious painting. Not so. An anonymous painting of Guanyin on a Lotus Leaf (figure 4.29) appears to be by one of them, perhaps the same who painted the scholar-and-beauty scene (see figure 5.1) and the others discussed earlier as a definable group; the

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4.29 Anonymous (mid- or later eighteenth century), Guanyin on a Lotus Leaf. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 106 x 61 cm. Indianapolis Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. John H. Roberts Jr..

faces of Guanyin and the beautiful woman in the two pictures are all but identical, and the handling of textile patterns, gold ornaments, and other materials is also closely similar. And, as the entry for this painting in a recent exhibition catalog perceptively puts it, this is a secularized Guanyin, “a quintessential Qing-dynasty beauty. . . . She could pass quite easily for a young woman longing for the return of her beloved.” 40 The goddess reclines languidly on the lotus leaf, resting her face lightly on her hand and gazing down at the boy Sudhana, who reaches for the white parakeet in the same way that boys in “women waiting” paintings reach for toys. Her seductive pose, with her bare feet (powerfully erotic to Chinese viewers) and gauzy robe, place her in the company of “Mme. Hedong” (see figure 5.8) and the other meiren paintings of this type. But before we dismiss the picture as inadequate to its religious subject, more beauty than goddess, we should note that the bodhisattva Guanyin was indeed in some forms a seductress, using her sexual lures to bring about men’s spiritual transformation and conversion to Buddhist faith.41 Also, the iconography of the Guanyin in this painting belongs to the vision of her presented in a collection of popular Chinese tales, so that the work could be seen as a kind of narrative picture.42 The cult of Guanyin had a special appeal to women, and the painting might have hung originally in a woman’s chamber. A woodblock print of Guanyin in the same pose, undated but probably earlier than the painting and thus likely to have been the model for it, is part of a printed series of Fifty-three Images of Guanyin.43 The painter has altered the drapery drawing and shown the goddess’s bare feet to enhance the effect of voluptuousness, besides adding the figure of the boy pilgrim Sudhana and the white parakeet. The Guanyin painting has been introduced to show the close relationship that can exist between subjects as seemingly disparate as goddess and mortal beauty. Many other Buddhist and Daoist paintings by artists of the urban-studio type can be identified. But, as noted earlier, religious painting has been left out of this book since, unlike the categories addressed, it has been well treated elsewhere.44 Narrative Paintings

Narrative paintings, especially illustrations to fiction and plays, were another of the subject categories in which the urban studio masters specialized. Woodblockprinted illustrations to such texts from the Ming and Qing periods are relatively well known and studied, since they are more easily accessible in library collections of old Chinese books, and more easily reproduced.45 Painted examples, by contrast, remain little noticed. Painted narrative pictures turn up in less prominent collections, lie neglected in museum storage cabinets, or pass through auctions, where a leaf or two will be reproduced in the catalog; they are bought for modest prices, only to disappear again. Among these pictures, however, are works of high artistic quality, which can moreover be of considerable interest to specialists in Chinese literature. A handscroll that appeared in a New York auction in 1989, for example, contained four rather mysterious paintings without identifying texts, including a scene in which a young man with a strangely European-style coiffure encounters a beauti-

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4.30 Zhang Jing (eighteenth century), Encounter on a Mountain Path, nar­ rative painting of an unidentified subject. One of four album leaves mounted in a handscroll, two seals of the artist on each, ink and col- ors on silk, each 25.5 x 33 cm. © Christie’s Images Ltd. [1989]. All rights reserved [CHP041289120].

4.31 Anonymous (early Qing, perhaps late seventeenth century), A MonsterRevealing Mirror. Probably a large album leaf, ink and light colors on silk, 52 x 40 cm. Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, Beijing.

ful girl and (one surmises) her elderly mother (figure 4.30). The scene should eventually be identifiable as belonging to some printed narrative; for now, it remains unexplained. Painting of this kind presumably exists in some quantity, preserved in obscure places, unrecognized. Seals on each of the paintings identify the artist as a certain Zhang Jing, who may be an artist of that name from Dangtu in eastern Anhui, southwest of Nanjing, active probably in the eighteenth century. The four seem to belong to no program: another of the paintings in the scroll is an illustration to the Pipa Xing (Lute Song) by the Tang poet Bo Juyi, and still another a copy of the “making clothes” leaf from the sericulture series in Jiao Bingzhen’s Gengzhi Tu (cf. figures 3.7 and 3.8). Such a disparate grouping must represent chance survivals from what was once a coherent program. A similar but larger picture is equally mysterious in subject and authorship (figure 4.31) but, judging from the figure style, is the work of some follower of Cui Zizhong, probably active in the early Qing, and so another candidate for inclusion in our hypothetical northern figure school (cf. chapter 3, “A ‘Northern School’ of Figure and Figure-in-Landscape Painting?” and figure 3.18). The man in the picture is identified in the inscription as Wang Ji or Wang Donggao, an early Tang period eccentric and drunkard who appears here as a Daoist magician with his boy servant. He stands with legs wide apart in the exaggerated posture typical of Cui’s style, holding out a mirror, which in popular belief could reveal disguised monsters (like vampires in Europe) by not reflecting their images. The monkey before them is indeed a demon monkey, carrying what may be peaches of immortality and looking back over its shoulder at them fearfully while fleeing toward a waterfall. One can assume that a great many accomplished and arresting pictures like this were produced as illustrations to popular stories, and hope that more of them will come to light and their subjects be identified. Among the albums or series of narrative paintings that have passed through auctions in recent years are an album containing eight illustrations, some explicitly erotic, to Li Yu’s novel Roupu Tuan (The Prayer Mat of Flesh); two albums (numbered 51 and 66) from what must have been a long series illustrating Pu Songling’s enormously popular Liaozhai Zhiyi, a collection of stories of the supernatural; and an album illustrating an unidentified text, its thirty-two leaves attributed to Fang Xiaowei, a painter who is said to have served at court in the Kangxi period.46 A painting reproduced in old books under the name of Tang Yin but stylistically of the Qing period (figure 4.32) seems to be a scene from The Story of the Western Wing, in which a young man (perhaps Scholar Zhang) is delivering a secret letter to a maid (perhaps Hongniang). It combines Westernized elements—the strong vanishing-point rendering of the wall and gate, the shading of faces and garments— with more traditional drawing of rocks and trees for a lively narrative effect. Most interestingly, since it does not depict a central episode of the story, nor is it (as the large picture on silk, figure 5.1, is usually taken to be) a quasi-iconic representation of the principals, it is likely to have been one of a series of hanging scroll illustrations, or else one panel in a much larger composition extending over a number of

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4.32 Possibly Cui Hui (active ca. 1720s– 40s or after; old attribution to Tang Yin). Perhaps a scene from The Story of the Western Wing. From Shenzhou Guoguangji 13; Ershijia Shinü Huacun 6 (as Tang Yin).

4.33 After Qiu Ying, scene from The Story of the Western Wing. Leaf from an album, ink and colors on silk, 31.2 x 28.5 cm. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

4.34 Anonymous (seventeenth century; attributed to Qiu Ying, with his seals), scene from The Story of the Western Wing. Leaf from an album of eight illustrations, ink and colors on silk, 18.4 x 37.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1911.505f.

scrolls. (The same was probably true of the strange narrative painting The Whip­ ping introduced in the previous chapter, figure 3.17.) It raises once more the question of where such a large-scale serial work would have been hung. In itself it is a tantalizing fragment, appearing in its style to be a product of the northern school of figure painting that was hazily defined at the end of chapter 3; it appears closest in style to Cui Hui. Narrative paintings in handscroll form are known from early periods, and have been well studied. Narrative albums, containing a series of pictures telling or illustrating a story, appear to have come into use only later; the earliest known example is from the fourteenth century, an anonymous thirty-leaf album of illustrations to Xiyou Ji, the mythicized story of the Tang monk Xuancang’s journey to the West.47 Qiu Ying is said to have painted such albums in the middle Ming, but it would appear that no genuine example by him survives. A series of twenty illustrations to Xixiang Ji (The Story of the Western Wing) ascribed to him, with accompanying calligraphy in neat small-standard script and with signatures and seals of Wen Zheng­ming, exists in a number of copies, none of which appears to be earlier than the late Ming or early Qing; they are true Suzhou pian, made by minor followers of the two great middle-Ming masters. Two versions of this collaborative work have been published, out of many that survive.48 Reproduced here, to represent this multiversion series, is a leaf from an example in the East Asian Library at Berkeley (figure 4.33).49 The compositional and narrative conventions—the garden setting identified by bushes and trees and taihu-shi (ornamental rocks), the space demarcated by the wall over which Scholar Zhang climbs to join Cui Yingying and her maid Hongniang—are the same seen in Ming woodblock-printed illustrations, which, at the simplest level, can be seen as linear reductions of paintings such as these. 50 The drawing and coloring are undistinguished, but skilled enough for the picture to serve its function of evoking the familiar scene in the minds of passionate readers of this romantic drama. Another surviving Xixiang Ji album, in the Freer Gallery of Art, consists of eight horizontal leaves similarly attributed to Qiu Ying and bearing his seals, but is also later in date, perhaps early Qing (figure 4.34). In the opening leaf Cui Yingying is seen at her dressing table in a room overlooking a lotus pond, reading the love letter she has received from Scholar Zhang; Hongniang waits on a bridge outside. The lush setting and rich colors set the mood for the couple’s coming bliss, and two mandarin ducks in the water augur their eventual marriage. It seems probable that Qiu Ying did such pictures, and that some of the surviving sets are copied after his designs; but they might also be compositions invented later by lesser masters. The same is true of the illustrative handscrolls, in which sets of narrative pictures are interspersed with the texts they illustrate, that survive in great numbers from the late Ming and early Qing. Although many, perhaps most, are attributed to Qiu Ying and often bear his spurious signature and seals, they are nearly all the work of lesser and later followers, either copying his designs or done in his style. These make up a substantial part of surviving Suzhou pian, and are frequently to

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be found in old collections. The subjects they portray are disproportionately of a kind that would have had a special appeal to female viewers—The Women’s Classic of Filial Piety, Lady Su Hui and Her Palindrome, Lady Wenji’s Return to Han, Em­ inent Women of the Past—and I argue elsewhere that they mostly belong to our stillhypothetical category of paintings done for an audience composed largely of women.51 Apart from subject, moreover, it makes sense that narrative and illustrative handscrolls would have been especially acquired and treasured by women: they can be enjoyed in private and read quietly like a book, unlike literati landscapes, which often demanded performances of cultivated connoisseurship before an audience of fellow males. Moreover, those who could not read, or only with difficulty, could skip the texts and simply read the pictures. And since women were not part of the system of connoisseurship and collecting that valued only authentic works by name masters, the question of whether the scroll was really by Qiu Ying was presumably of small concern to them. Belonging loosely within this tradition, but a reliable work by a known early Qing artist, is an album depicting ten historical episodes (gushi), especially those involving romantic relationships between men and women, or eminent women alone. The album, another example of painting embodying the ideal of qing, may well have been intended for a female clientele. The painter, Fan Xueyi, was a Suzhou woman artist active in the Kangxi era.52 One leaf illustrates the story of Zhang Chang (d. 51 b.c.e.), who, arriving late one day at court, explained that he had been at home painting his wife’s eyebrows (figure 4.35). To the emperor’s suggestion that this was unseemly behavior he replied, “Your servant has heard that in the intimacies between husband and wife in the privacy of the boudoir more things may occur than the painting of eyebrows.”53 Once more, a scene of domesticity is tinged with the erotic, which Fan Xueyi has heightened delicately by showing the maid pulling back the curtains of their bed, revealing rumpled bedclothes. She has indicated the high cultural level of the principals by painting (quite anachronistically) a landscape in the Ni Zan manner on the screen behind them. Another leaf depicts Qin Nü, the Lady of Qin, playing the flute (figure 4.36). According to the legend, a daughter of Duke Mu of Qin named Nongyu learned from her husband, a flutist named Xiaoshi, to play music resembling the calls of the phoenix, so skillfully that when the two played it the phoenix would come to them. In the picture she and ­X iaoshi sit in an open upstairs room, she playing the flute, he gazing at her fondly; in the sky at upper left, the phoenix is seen flying toward them through the clouds. Fan Xueyi and another woman painter from Suzhou named Fu Derong, both represented by extant works (one of Fu’s is a fan painting depicting a lady holding a flower and floating over waves), are early Qing followers, it would appear, of Qiu Zhu (or Qiu Shi, “Miss Qiu”), Qiu Ying’s daughter, as women painters who specialized in subjects of special appeal to female viewers.54 My attempt to delineate a category of women’s painting (regardless of whether painted by women) consistently leads back to the city of Suzhou, and to followers, imitators, or copyists of Qiu Ying.

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4.35 Fan Xueyi (active late seventeenth century), Painting the Eyebrows. Leaf from an album of ten illustrations to old stories, ink and colors on silk, 37.1 x 32.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

4.36 Fan Xueyi, The Lady of Qin Playing the Flute. Another leaf from the same album as figure 4.35.

For this phenomenon to be centered in Suzhou is unsurprising in view not only of the prominence of women in the city’s culture,55 but also of their active participation in the production of textiles and handicrafts, such as embroidery, that were the basis of the city’s wealth. The paintings as a group exhibit high-level craftsmanlike qualities that link them to that great Suzhou tradition. The same qualities, however, ensured that they would suffer a fate like that of the women themselves, whose achievements came to be, as Cass writes, “overlooked, and written out of the record” by the male-dominated critical establishment of later periods. 56 A major count against these paintings was their failure to offer stylistic innovations and individualized brushwork of the kind appreciated by Chinese connoisseurs, whose ideology ruled out thematic inventiveness, sensitive portrayals of human subjects, and technical excellence as positive criteria for judging paintings. For all the unrecognized achievements of the late Ming and early Qing followers of Qiu Ying, the feat of bringing innovation and new vigor to Suzhou figure and narrative painting in the early Qing period—but still not of a kind that would win them fame and recognition—was principally accomplished by Gu Jianlong and his followers. Consideration of the ways in which they did this does not belong here, since they are tied to the development of the high-level erotic album. One of Gu’s album projects, however, deserves introduction here for its importance as a major monument of Chinese narrative painting. This is his set of two hundred illustrations to Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), the great late-Ming-period erotic novel. 57

Originally kept in the imperial palace in four albums, the large leaves, painted in rich colors on silk, are now dispersed among a number of collections. 58 The whole series was published in the 1940s under the title Qinggong Zhencang Bimei Tu (Two Hundred Beauties Pictures [formerly] Treasured in the Qing Palace); there have been several reprints. The albums have been published as anonymous, since no signature or other indication of authorship accompanies them; the attribution here to Gu Jianlong is based on the closely similar style (especially figure style) of the leaves, along with distinctive imagery of domestic furnishings and other material things, to those in a published album by Gu and others of his works. 59 Two leaves from the Jin Ping Mei albums will be introduced in the next chapter (figures 5.4 and 5.6), representing a scene of carousing and the hanging of a meiren painting in a brothel. Part of the value of these paintings lies in the detailed descriptions they provide of the milieus within which works of this kind were made and used, the physical settings of wine shops and bordellos but also the households of rich merchants and officials. Although the story is set in the Song period, the novelist and the artist both portray their contemporary worlds, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. An illustration to chapter 20 of the book presents the moment when the antihero, Ximen Qing, having taken the recently widowed Li Ping’er into his household as still another wife, is induced by his low-class drinking cronies to have her appear before them to kowtow and receive their congratulations. Li Ping’er enters accompanied by four singing girls, while Ximen Qing’s other wives, jealous and upset, spy on the proceedings from behind a screen (figure 4.37).60 Many of Gu Jianlong’s leaves, including this one, are loosely based on an earlier series of woodblock illustrations to the novel. The painted version enlarges and elaborates the composition, and characterizes the figures more subtly. Another leaf, illustrating the sixtieth chapter, portrays the brocade shop that is one source of Ximen Qing’s wealth (figure 4.38). Inside the shop employees are measuring brocade chosen by a customer and weighing silver ingots for payment. In the street outside a woman carrying a wrapped lute importunes a man, perhaps her husband, to go in with her; he waves an abacus at her, indicating that he has more urgent and important things to do. A peddler of what may be sweet mochi offers it to two young customers. The high vantage point, looking over the roof of a foreground building, and the scalloped-edged cloud at top are old conventions that allow the artist to spread out his narrative materials for maximum readability. Other ways of portraying city streets and the shops along them will be introduced in the section that follows. Cityscapes: Scenes of Urban Life

A great many handscrolls based loosely on the great Qingming Festival on the River scroll of the Song Dynasty, and mostly modeled to some degree on that masterwork, were painted in Suzhou in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many of them bearing false signatures of Qiu Ying. They are, as a group and with few exceptions,

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4.37 Probably Gu Jianlong, Ximen Qing Foolishly Presents His New Wife, Mistress Ping, to His Worthless and Bibulous Guests. Illustration to Jin Ping Mei. Album leaf, ink and colors on silk, 39 x 31.4 cm. The Nelson-­Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; purchase: the Mrs. Kenneth A. Spencer Fund, F80–10/4. Photograph by Edward C. Robison III.

4.38 Probably Gu Jianlong, Ximen Qing’s Brocade Shop. Illustration to Jin Ping Mei. Formerly owned by Andrew Franklin, London; current ownership unknown.

pictures of small interest, although their large-scale production indicates that they were entertaining for people of the time. Cityscapes are prominent among the large collaborative works produced by artists in the Imperial Academy in the same period, sometimes with help from painters temporarily engaged from outside. Especially impressive are two series of long scrolls depicting the southern tours of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors that have been the objects of intensive research by Maxwell Hearn.61 They are sumptuous productions, especially the Qianlong series, as can be seen in a detail from the scroll now in the Metropolitan Museum depicting the emperor’s visit to Suzhou (figure 4.39). The project was accomplished over a period of six years, between 1764 and 1770, by the court artist Xu Yang—himself a Suzhou native (active 1750– after 1776)—no doubt with the help of assistants, who go unnamed. Like the series of scrolls that preceded them, representing Kangxi’s imperial progress, the paintings are like hugely elaborated picture-maps, laying out the physical settings of the emperor’s routes and the famous places he visited.62 They include a wealth of detail of street scenes and urban activities, but the figures and buildings are repetitive and stiff. Xu Yang’s brief, we can assume, was to produce scrolls that recalled the emperor’s experience of the places he visited, and that is what the scrolls give us: grand constructions and performances produced for the imperial visit, hordes of mostly indistinguishable people, quick and generalized looks at the shops and other sights along the way. These scrolls record the grandiose display that was laid

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4.39 Xu Yang (active 1750–after 1776), The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, scroll 6: Entering Suzhou along the Grand Canal. Section of a handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 68.8 x 1,994 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase: The Dillon Fund Gift, 1988 (1988.360). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

4.40 Xu Yang, The Puji Bridge, from The Flourishing City (panorama of Suzhou). Section of a handscroll, ink and colors on paper, 35.8 x 1,225 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum.

on everywhere the emperor went; we must look elsewhere for visual reports of everyday urban life as it resumed after he had gone home to the palace. The same Xu Yang had painted another panoramic scroll of Suzhou for the emperor in 1759, ending at Tiger Hill in the environs of the city; this too is remarkable and informative as a cityscape but offers only a rather distant and disengaged view in which the figures, shops, and boats have a ready-made character, lacking liveliness and specificity, as a detail reveals (figure 4.40). The place depicted is the Puji Bridge, near which, as we can read elsewhere, were many shops of the kind for which Tiger Hill was famous, including the Shantang Painting Market, where one could find every kind of painting, “rough brush and fine brush, all in traditional styles. . . . Those by the Sha Family were best—they were known as ‘Sha’s images.’ [There were paintings of ] Lords of Heaven and Three Stars [birthday pictures], figure paintings and historical scenes, as well as landscapes, flowers, birds and animals; the paintings of beautiful women (meiren) were especially fine. It is said that . . . Qiu Ying once sold his paintings here.”63 But the painting provides only the most conventional and unspecific indications of the shops for paintings. It is as if the artist and his assistants were not really much interested in the daily life of the city and its pleasures, besides being too respectful of the emperor and the court to inflict such trivialities on them. We may wish that we could move in for closer, more leisurely and intimate inspection of some of the activities portrayed, look closely into some of the shops, and persuade the people to relax a bit, as if they were off camera. Here again one of the forgotten urban professional artists obliges. At the same time that Xu Yang and his workshop were producing the Qianlong’s Southern Tour series, in 1768, an unnamed painter—another of the small masters of Suzhou—was engaged to do a scroll commemorating a visit to Tiger Hill by Su Dingyuan, who had served for five years as viceroy of Jiangsu, and who was invited on an outing to the eastern suburbs of the city by a Mr. Lao.64 The scroll begins with an inscription: “Mr. Su Dingyuan, [styled?] Fangbo, has administered Jiangsu for five years. Mr. Lao invited him on a spring outing to the eastern suburbs, and commissioned a painter [huashi, “artisan painter”] to make this picture. Starting at Duya, it portrays the neighborhood of Tiger Hill, with its environs. All the assembled people had a good time, as if they were climbing the Spring Terrace. . . . When I saw the painting I gave it the title Spring Pleasures at Tiger Hill, and added this poem [the poem follows]. Mouzi year of the Qianlong [era, i.e., 1768], inscribed by Cao Xiuxian.” Near the beginning of the scroll we see the company approaching the hill; it must be Su, as the guest of honor, who occupies the sedan chair and is depicted largest, and his host and entourage who accompany him on horseback (figures 4.41 and 4.42). His is a much more modest procession than Qianlong’s, as the latter is shown in the central part of Xu Yang’s scroll (figure 4.43). The faces of Su Ding­ yuan’s companions appear to be portraits, and presumably include his host, Mr. Lao, who engaged the artist to make a pictorial record of the visit. The painter may

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4.41 and 4.42 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill. Dated 1768. Two sections of a handscroll, ink and colors on silk. Formerly owned by Andrew Franklin, London; now belongs to Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

4.43 Xu Yang, The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, scroll 6: Entering Suzhou along the Grand Canal. Another section of the same handscroll as figure 4.39. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

have accompanied the group, sketching as he went, but he must also have known the shops and restaurants at the foot of Tiger Hill well enough to portray them from memory as part of his repertory. Most of the scroll, in fact, probably repeats a series of images he had done many times before. His painting of the horses and figures at the beginning of the scroll is awkward, but in the later parts, depicting more familiar subjects, he displays not only a detailed acquaintance with the pleasures of Tiger Hill but also a charming ease and lightness of style seldom seen in Chinese painting, avoiding the heavy earnestness of the Qianlong’s Southern Tour scrolls. The aim of both the artist and Mr. Lao was to give Su Dingyuan a vivid and nostalgic reminder of the places and pleasures he had enjoyed at Tiger Hill. In contrast to Xu Yang’s set piece, the anonymous scroll offers the viewer a delightful excursion through the bustling entertainment district at the foot of Tiger Hill, with stops to examine some of the shops and other establishments close up, and leisure to observe the ordinary denizens of the city amusing themselves. Rolling farther, we see the outriders leading the procession, with standard-bearers proclaiming the coming of the viceroy of Jiangsu. They pass an antiques shop below which, on the canal, are gentlemen partying in pleasure boats, dining and playing music (figure 4.44). Farther on we encounter a welcoming party, including an elderly couple and what appear to be two beautiful entertainers, who are being ogled through a kind of monocle by one of the waiting men (figure 4.45). The pleasure boat below, empty except for the boatmen, is ready to accommodate Su and the other guests. The contrast between this and the imperial scrolls typifies the relationship between “high” and “low” in paintings of this kind: it is the low example, by an artist who knew intimately the people and places he was depicting instead of observing

4.44–52 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill. Sections and details from the same handscroll as figure 4.41.

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4.45

them briefly as an outsider, that provides an abundance of particulars specific to the time and place, along with a kind of witty social commentary, and even betrays some interest in the feelings of the people who appear in it (figure 4.46). Servants in a restaurant on the canal buy fish and prepare dishes, carrying them to banqueters in the upstairs room, while a female servant hangs the laundry and two women eat their dinners while they wait, perhaps, for a call to entertain guests. Another woman entertainer, tugged by her child, gazes moodily out over the water; three simple bird-and-flower pictures pinned to the wall behind her suggest a modest way of life that is not without its small refinements (figure 4.47). Such a scene may recall the lovely entertainers in Japanese prints by Harunobu (exactly contemporaneous) who have left a party to stand alone on a veranda, subtly expressing in their postures and faces the melancholy that follows forced merriment. Paintings such as this allow us to escape somewhat the iconic conventions of the meiren picture and see more deeply into the lives of the women—although, needless to say, these urban scenes too, if we had more of them, would be seen to follow other conventions of their own. A group of richly robed, geishalike women with gold hair ornaments, again accompanied by children, pass the time between entertaining guests in a boat (figure 4.48); a boat-girl waits below a bridge, hoping to attract a passenger, while her little boy peeps through the cabin door (figure 4.49). Equally entertaining and informative are depictions of the toy shops for which Tiger Hill was famous. In chapter 67 of Honglou Meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber) we can read a description of a group of these toys brought back from Suzhou for Baochai by her brother; she gives a few of them to Lin Daiyu, in whom they bring on “a severe attack of nostalgia” for her home city. The “novelties from Huqiu Shan” (Tiger Hill) that are described include “little mercury-filled automata who turned somersaults when you put them down on the floor or a table, automata with sand-filled cylindrical bodies whose arms and heads moved when you set the sand running, and lots and lots of scenes from drama made up of tiny figures molded in

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4.46–48

4.49–50

colored clay.”65 Where else than in this scroll—and, one may hope, in others of the kind yet undiscovered—is this description in words matched with images? In a shop selling dolls, perhaps automata, a bespectacled artisan touches up the head of one of them (figure 4.50); in another selling roly-polies like Japanese Daruma dolls, the shopwoman waiting on a man and child is observed by a man with spectacles, while an older woman sews costumes for the toys in the back room (figure 4.51). And finally, at the entrance to a temple, behind a row of monks, is a booth selling objects not easily identified except for a large shell, where one can also buy unmounted meiren pictures, a painting of a beauty reclining on a banana leaf (perhaps the one now in the Metropolitan Museum, ascribed to Tang Yin),66 or a landscape in the manner of Ni Zan, according to one’s taste (figure 4.52) These are only a sampling of the delights offered by this scroll. No misdirection in period or authorship is involved here—the painting presents itself as nothing

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4.51–52

other than what it is. But its honesty goes unrewarded; it bears the compounded stigmata of anonymity, functionalism, popular style, and engaging subject; no respectable Chinese connoisseur would do more than glance at the beginning before quickly rolling it up again. The seeming mismatch between the clumsy opening section, with its procession on horseback, and the confident, highly informed painting of the rest—can these be by the same painter?—is probably best understood as revealing the circumstances of the commissioning and production of such a scroll, and how it fitted into the nameless artist’s customary pattern of output. The unrolling panorama of the sights and customs of the Tiger Hill pleasure district, which he knew intimately from years of living among them and could depict in fine and sensitive detail, made up his stockin-trade set of images, worked out earlier in his career and repeated with little change in numerous scrolls done for clients who wanted them to celebrate visits to the place or, as here, to commemorate special occasions. His basic product would be adapted to fit the special circumstances of those occasions. That the artist had painted the same diverting series of scenes in the same way numerous times before made no difference to the buyers, who no more expected uniqueness or originality than did the purchasers of “Qiu Ying” sets of Xixiang Ji illustrations, or Spring Festival on the River scrolls “by Zhang Zeduan,” which were similarly being produced in multiples by other Suzhou picture masters for sale in the thriving markets there. Other artists might have available ready-made New Year’s pictures, idealized images of prosperous families celebrating that holiday, or sets of pictures of the exemplary activities of a gentry landowner (see figure 4.16), that could be used as-is or adapted with minor additions for special needs. That other Tiger Hill scrolls by this same small master have not come to light is no mystery; this one survived, crudely mounted, and became known to me only when it was brought out by chance by an unknown foreign collector with a special fondness for popular, non-elite kinds of Chinese painting.67

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A point to be made strongly, in dealing with low-class paintings of this kind, is that it is not merely a matter of the excluded categories of Chinese painting being, on the whole, equal in quality to the more familiar kinds; they often exhibit qualities that cannot easily be found among the critically accepted categories. This is because the artists who did them were permitted by their very exclusion from the polite realm of painting to infuse their works with expressions of human feeling and warmth, incident and drama, close observation of the world around them, and more relaxed renderings of scenes of everyday life that were taboo for their more critically elevated contemporaries. High quality in Chinese painting, at least since the Song Dynasty, had been implicitly defined as the absence of just those qualities, since true connoisseurs should not succumb to such blandishments; and we have unthinkingly accepted this version of the matter. Another generation of searching out, reattributing, reordering, and reassessing these paintings will be needed before we can make with confidence the kind of statement I am about to make as a conjecture. What we have assumed to be deficiencies in post-Song Chinese painting, the absence of areas of subject matter and expression that are taken for granted in the European and American painting traditions, or in the Japanese ukiyo’e and fu¯ zoku’ga schools of genre painting, may prove to be absences only within the confines of the official version of the art. Much of what we have felt to be missing from Chinese painting, that is, may well prove after all to be there, once we look outside the conventional boundaries, beyond the walls that the Chinese literati critics have erected.

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five

Beautiful Women and the Courtesan Culture

Pictures of the Courtesan Culture From the late sixteenth century into the seventeenth, the rise and flourishing of a mercantile economy brought new prosperity to the cities, especially those of the Jiangnan region, as previously mentioned. As Paul Ropp writes, “The resulting surplus of wealth and leisure produced in turn numerous entertainment centers— tea houses, wine shops, pleasure boats, brothels, handicraft shops—and a growing class of entertainers such as singing girls, prostitutes, acting troupes, and storytellers.”1 The more fortunate and talented of the singing girls or prostitutes could rise to a status like that of the geisha in Japan, cultivated women who in most cases did not escape entirely the necessity of providing sexual services to men but could be more chary with their favors than common prostitutes. They could also provide a great deal more: their talents and expertise in music, poetry, dance, and acting, along with their conversational skills, made them fit companions for educated men and prized entertainers at elegant parties. These women have been the subjects of a great deal of recent writing, in which they are variously called geisha, women of the demimonde, and courtesans; I use the last term.2 The growth of a

5.1 Anonymous (mid- or later eighteenth century), scene from The Story of the Western Wing. Hanging scroll mounted as a panel, ink and colors on silk, 198.5 x 130.6 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.517.

courtesan culture, flourishing in the pleasure districts of the cities in the late Ming and early Qing, allowed the ideal of romantic love to permeate the upper levels of Chinese society as never before, and to inform the relationships between the sexes both in literature and in life. A puritanical social code prevented men, except rarely, from having sexual affairs with “decent” women, at least in the circles in which the scholar-writers moved. Liaisons with prostitutes and courtesans, on the other hand, had been the very model of romantic love at least since the Tang dynasty, when the caizi jiaren, “talented scholar and beautiful woman,” ideal first took hold. 3 Many men of this time found their only exposure to romantic love in the brothels. Prominent litterateurs, scholars, and government officials, as well as merchants, frequented these quarters for relaxation and cultivated company—they transacted business there, and composed poems—and sometimes chose beloved courtesans to be their concubines and constant companions. I outlined in the preceding chapter how old social mores were breaking down, and the concept of qing, feeling or romantic love, was gaining currency over sterner Confucian virtues. For men of culture and means, the vision of an ideal life was changing: instead of desiring (or claiming to desire) escape from the cities and life as recluses, they now recognized that they might find emotional fulfillment in the cities, a self-realization outside traditional patterns, either Confucian or Buddhist. Many of the paintings treated in this book can best be situated and understood in the context of this courtesan culture. It is beautifully reflected, for example, in a large anonymous painting, datable to the middle of the eighteenth century or a bit later, that is usually thought to depict the three principals of the immensely popular drama Xixiang Ji, or The Story of the Western Wing: Zhang Junrui (Scholar Zhang), Cui Yingying (Oriole), and her maid Hongniang (Crimson; figure 5.1).4 The “see through” convention of representing a space opening back beyond the foreground figures here reveals a luxuriously appointed interior room partially viewed through a moon door. If the usual identification is correct, this must be the chamber of Cui Yingying, where the tasteful arrangement of books and antiques testifies to her personal refinement. But even if it is simply a picture of a courtesan and her maid entertaining a lover, the indications are no less appropriate. A farther door opens into a garden, completing the structure of deep penetration often displayed in such paintings (cf. Jin Tingbiao’s Lady Putting Flowers in Her Hair, figure 2.17). The two lovers and their companion appear languid, gazing raptly at each other, more like figures in a ritual drama than participants in a real, passion-charged situation. They are acting out the caizi jiaren ideal, which Victoria Cass renders as “the man of talent and the woman of excellence,” bringing out its implication of a perfect matching of qualities and temperaments.5 The blurring of gender boundaries implicit in this relationship underlies the near-identity of the two lovers’ faces in the painting—they differ little except that his eyebrows are heavier, hers, “mothlike”—and the completeness of their mutual absorption. Keith McMahon writes that in such pairings, “the beauties and scholars . . . each contain the other in cross-gendered symmetry, each having the looks or taking on the attributes of the other.”6

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The Story of the Western Wing, one of China’s two most popular love-dramas (the other was Mudan Ting [Peony Pavilion], which for some unexplored reason has inspired fewer paintings and sets of printed illustrations), was composed in the late thirteenth century and reprinted repeatedly in the Ming period.7 Along with Peony Pavilion, it is the best-known expression of the scholar-beauty romantic ideal in literature, and this painting, regardless of whether it illustrates that story, may well be the finest in art. I introduce an earlier and less subtle one below (figure 5.10). With this painting and the Eight Beauties on the Balcony of a Brothel (see figure 2.1 for whole; figure 5.2 is a detail), we begin to discern a type of picture that must, from its very character, have been intended for public display, probably in restaurants, wine shops, brothels, and the like. The sizes of these works and their subjects suggest settings of that kind for them: one could imagine the Western Wing picture, with its affecting portrayal of romantic dalliance, hanging in a private home, but who would put in his parlor or reception hall a ten-foot-wide painting of eight prostitutes on a balcony? The Chinese house, in any case, provided no suitable space for displaying a work of this size and shape, quite apart from the unsuitability of its subject to a domestic environment. Although paintings of single meiren (beauties) were hung in private houses, big paintings like these with multiple figures must have been intended for public display. Their large scale means that the figures in them can sometimes be life-size or close to it, so that the viewer finds it easier to respond or relate to them as though to real people. They seem accessible because they use illusionistic techniques, devices for making the picture space appear coextensive with the viewer’s own. The Western Wing picture, for example, accomplishes this effect by the size and foreground placement of the figures and the opening back into a farther room. The artist of the Eight Beauties, in addition to other illusionistic techniques, uses a framing device by which viewers are made to read the lattice railing and the posts at each end as marking the picture plane, from which the women’s fingers and sleeves seem to project into the viewer’s space, and we feel we can almost reach out to touch them. The device is common in European paintings, but was not employed in China until Chinese artists knew about such foreign pictures (and prints based on them). Perhaps such a painting as the Eight Beauties was meant for hanging in a bordello, restaurant, or wine shop as an advertisement and enticement. Conceivably, the women portrayed were real-life courtesans belonging to a particular house, like those who sometimes appear in Japanese ukiyo’e print series; although at first glance they look almost indistinguishable from one another (like the women in the Japanese prints), they exhibit subtle differentiations in facial shape and color as well as other features that might have permitted aficionados of the time to identify them. One may wonder whether a Chinese viewer would have distinguished any more easily between one publicity photo of a platinum-blonde Hollywood starlet of the 1930s and another. The painting calls to mind a passage in Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth, in which the peasant Wang Lung goes to a teahouse in a nearby town and sits drinking tea while gazing at paintings of beautiful women hung

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5.2 Hua Xuan (active ca. 1736), Detail of Eight Beauties on the Balcony of a Brothel; for the whole, see figure 2.1. Dated 1736. Private collection; courtesy Sotheby’s.

around the walls. The proprietress informs him that if he will “put silver in her hand” and choose one she will bring the woman to him: the establishment is in fact a brothel, with the women waiting in rooms upstairs. Buck’s description of Wang Lung’s response to the paintings makes it obvious that they were differentiated enough in facial and other features to allow him to make a choice. But Buck, though she had lived in China, may have made up the incident out of whole cloth, since it is not paralleled, to my knowledge, in any Chinese story.8 It is worth noting again that large academic-style paintings like these depicting women and popular-culture subjects, especially those of a generic character, almost

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never have extended inscriptions, appreciative or poetic, written on them by the artists or others, nor do they ever bear dedications to any recipient. At most they bear a signature and a date, occasionally a title, always inconspicuously inscribed. The absence of dedications (commonly found on other kinds of paintings) indicates what we would suppose anyway, that these were produced for general audiences and buyers, and were not one-of-a-kind, “bespoke” paintings. In the Eight Beauties picture we see the outside of a brothel, a balcony overlooking the street. An anonymous work formerly kept in an old European private collec­ tion may reveal what the inside of the brothel looked like (figure 5.3). The painting’s subject is described in the catalog of that collection as “distinguished ladies” engaged in domestic occupations, but this is probably another deliberate or unintended misdirection. Although it might represent the concubines of some wealthy household relaxing, the erotic undertones of the picture make it more likely that we are gazing into a brothel—and being gazed at in return: the two women set farthest back, one stretching and the other leaning on a table, look out directly, as do several of the “eight beauties.” The picture of the interior, though engaging, lacks the refinements of the Eight Beauties, whether because it is later in date or because it is the work of a less accomplished, perhaps provincial artist. The description of the women as “distinguished ladies” is no surprise. The Eight Beauties picture was similarly said to be a group portrait of the Ming artist Tang Yin’s eight consorts. It was so identified when it was first published, in the 1914 catalog of the Shanghai dealer E. H. Strehlneek; the Munich stage designer Emil Preetorius acquired the anonymous one probably in the 1930s. These and similar examples present another curious pattern: just as the Japanese, with their special tastes associated with Zen Buddhism and the tea ceremony, have rescued for us types of Chinese paintings that came to be depreciated in China and have virtually vanished there, so did the “low tastes” of Western collectors and dealers in the early part of the twentieth century permit the survival of a great many fine paintings that might otherwise have been lost. When a full history of the collecting of Chinese painting is written, it should include a section titled “In Praise of Bad Taste.” Scenes of brothel interiors can be found also in the albums of illustrations to Jin Ping Mei, the work of Gu Jianlong, introduced in the preceding chapter. One illustrates the scene in chapter 21 of the work in which Beggar Ying invites Ximen Qing and another crony to drink with him at Cassia’s house (figure 5.4). Ying Bojue (Beggar Ying) holds Cassia on his lap to kiss her while Ximen Qing watches; the other guest dallies with Cassia’s sister, Cinnamon; and the old procuress pours wine. 9 Another brothel scene from the Jin Ping Mei albums, to be discussed below (figure 5.6), includes a meiren painting hanging on the far wall, supplying information on at least one setting where such paintings were displayed. A rare example of a painting that records a particular moment in the negotiation of a sexual encounter in a brothel is now known only in an old photograph (figure 5.5).10 A maid is drawing aside a curtain to introduce a woman of the house to a guest—in effect, since both women look outward, to the viewer of the painting. It

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5.3 Anonymous (perhaps late eighteenth century), Women in a Brothel. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 37 x 70 cm. Staatliches Museum für Völker­ kunde, Munich. Emil Preetorius Collection (77-11-23). Photo: Marietta Weidner.

5.4 Probably Gu Jianlong (1606–88 or after), Beggar Ying Invites Cinna­ mon to Drink in the Willow Garden of Mother Li. Illustration to Jin Ping Mei. Album leaf, ink and color on silk, 39 x 31.4 cm. The Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; purchase: the Mrs. Kenneth A. Spence Fund, F80–10/2. Photograph by Jamison Miller.

5.5 Anonymous (mid- or later eighteenth century; false inscription and signature of Tang Yin), Woman in a Brothel Presented to a Guest. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 167 x 62.5 cm. Formerly owned by E. A. Strehlneek, Shanghai.

is a moment described in an early Qing account of brothel protocol: “As one entered the reception room, the ‘adopted mother’ respectfully made one welcome. . . . As one proceeded to the balustrade, a servant-girl finished her adornment and appeared with a beauty in hand.”11 The height of the picture (1.7 meters) and its illusionistic space—a cabinet with books and antiques stretches away at right, a figured rug extends out into the viewer’s space—must have increased, in the original, the imagined accessibility of the woman in the image. She raises one arm to hold forward an open sleeve, another sexual invitation, since a woman’s sleeve was an “entrée to the intimate parts of the body.”12 Here the message is enhanced by the unsubtle resemblance of the sleeve, in its shape and multilayered formation, to the vulva. The male viewer, even while he recognizes

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this as an imagined scene in a brothel, can scarcely help responding to the almost blatant invitation. Paul Rouzer, in his article “Watching the Voyeurs,” comments on this device as it is used in poetry: “a reversal of roles occurs. Rather than selecting the woman he finds attractive, the reader enjoys the experience of being selected himself. He in turn becomes the object of desire.”13 The detailed opulence of the setting and the sense of tight spatial enclosure link the painting to the Western Wing picture (figure 5.1) and Jin Tingbiao’s Lady Put­ ting Flowers in Her Hair (figure 2.17), indicating, along with other features of style, a date around the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and an origin in the northern school of figure painting. By that time, the artists who made meiren paintings had available a repertory of effective devices to intensify the sexual impact of their pictures, situating the woman firmly in an interior setting and signaling her availability with coded motifs. Some of this repertory, built up by long collective practice and invention as well as by adoptions from foreign pictures, will be explored below. Earlier stages of that development can be noted in a few dated works of the meiren genre, Yu Zhiding’s of 1697 (see figure 5.18) and Leng Mei’s of 1724 (see figure 5.20). Seen from the perspective of the male consumer of eroticized images of women, this transformation can be considered a kind of progress. But a great deal has been lost from a woman’s—or any relatively objective—point of view. The women in late Ming–early Qing paintings—the “Qiu Ying” album (figures 4.26–28), the Wang Qiao work of 1657 (figure 1.6), as well as one by Gu Jianlong (figure 5.15), two by Yu Zhiding (figures 5.16 and 5.17), and one by Jiao Bingzhen (figure 3.19)—are given space, dignity, sometimes a degree of individuality; feelings are sensitively ascribed to them, and they are not overtly eroticized. The same cannot be said of the women in the fully developed eighteenth-century type. What changes in the viewership for these paintings and the conditions surrounding their production might underlie this sweeping change? No simple answer suffices, but a good beginning would be to see the fully developed eighteenth-century type in painting as reflecting an increased commodification of the women. In the late Ming and early Qing, true romantic liaisons between cultivated courtesans and scholar-officials not only entered literature as ideal models but are also recorded, in a few cases, as occurring in real life, accompanied by exchanges of poems—exchanges that quintessentially signified affection between equals. By the mid-eighteenth century, the courtesan culture in this ideal form was decidedly a phenomenon of the past. In the more mercantile society of that later period, the purchase of a concubine or of a prostitute’s sexual favors were more common.14 The burgeoning urban prosperity of that age and the thriving entertainment districts produced, as Susan Mann puts it, “a growing commercial market for female prostitutes and entertainers,” and that commercialization, in turn, affected the status of the women.15 Dorothy Ko writes that the fall of Ming put to an end the “erudite and politicized existence of the Jiangnan courtesan culture,” and that “although Chinese courtesan culture was . . . sustained by the wealth generated in ur-

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ban centers, scholar-officials continued to constitute the primary clientele until the 18th century.”16 She quotes Kang-i Sun Chang’s argument that “despite the fall of the Ming, courtesan-poets continued to be active in the early Qing. But by the eighteenth century, ‘courtesans were virtually excluded from the world of refined letters.’ ”17 Susan Mann suggests another factor: the revival of classical learning, which “placed daughters, wives, and mothers at the center of a debate about women’s learning. In the course of this debate, courtesans became increasingly marginalized in the aesthetic lives of elite men.”18 It was a time when educated gentry women were taking on the prominence previously enjoyed by courtesans on the cultural scene, especially in poetry, and could consort more easily with men.19 These developments can, in turn, be related to other fields such as literature— Keith McMahon, for instance, writes that the “main burst” of erotic fiction lasted only from the mid-sixteenth century to the late seventeenth.20 Or they might be seen as part of a larger commodification of literati culture and its appropriation by the merchant class, including the nouveaux riches, a phenomenon that had become especially marked by the eighteenth century. However we construct the surrounding circumstances, we can see them as correlating with a marked change in the character of the paintings. Those from Ming and early Qing display more of the qualities we call poetic and often seem more charged with emotion; they are likely to impart a degree of independence to the women. Those from the eighteenth century, that is, the Yongzheng and Qianlong eras, tend to use the devices we will trace below to turn the women more effectively into objects of sexual desire and make them appear more easily accessible to the viewer. They create images, in other words, that seem to answer to the meiren voyeur’s dream, introduced into fiction already in the late seventeenth century by Pu Songling (1640–1715): to be drawn physically into the painting hanging on the wall, a picture done with “such exceptionally wondrous skill that the figure seemed alive,” there to be greeted by the beautiful girl who had captivated him in the painted image, and invited into her chamber for sexual embrace.21 The late Ming ideal of literary, noncommercial liaisons, bonded by intellectual and aesthetic affinity, held its attraction even after these changes had transformed or even supplanted the courtesan culture. Wai-yee Li writes of the persistence of this ideal as a matter of “cultural nostalgia,” and comments perceptively that for male writers, “memories of association with courtesans often involve perception of oneself as a character in a scholar-beauty romance.”22 I have noted how the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors laid claim to that role in the paintings done for them; other male enthusiasts for the paintings, inside or outside the court, must have enter­ tained similar fantasies, on a less grandiose scale. For the best of the meiren paintings, such as the one attributed to Leng Mei in the British Museum (see figure 5.13), it is probably a mistake to try to define closely the status of the woman represented— wife, concubine, courtesan, or even prostitute. The image is simply of the ideal, and for most male viewers unattainable, woman: lovely, refined, pliant.

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Meiren Hua, or Beautiful Woman Paintings

Where Did They Hang?

Meiren paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries almost always take the form of hanging scrolls: they were meant to be hung in rooms, to be gazed at and enjoyed, or to impart some particular ambience to the room. A few pieces of evidence, both pictorial and literary, have recently come to light that suggest answers to questions that once seemed unanswerable: Where did these paintings hang? 23 How did viewers of their time use them and respond to them? Fiction and drama of the Ming-Qing period would appear to provide clues, since beautiful-woman pictures appear frequently in them. But these must be used with caution, since the writers’ imaginings often do not correspond to real-world situations. In the literary writings, a portrait or self-portrait of a beautiful woman frequently stands in for the woman, who paints it herself or has it painted to preserve an image of her fading beauty. It is then seen by a man, who immediately falls in love with the woman in the picture. Or he may form a passion for a woman in a generic meiren picture, which turns out to be a portrait of a real woman.24 Beautifulwoman paintings and portraits of particular women function in literature as though they were interchangeable, the one easily mistakable for the other.25 But this is a literary convention, necessary for the writer’s purpose; it is like, and no less fictive than, the one by which the beauty can paint her own portrait simply by looking into a mirror and painting what she sees, or the man (untrained as a portraitist) can paint her portrait accurately and recognizably from memory, or even from a dream. Meiren paintings and true (as opposed to imaginary) portraits are distinct genres, each with its own identifiable conventions. Real portraits of living courtesans, for instance, present them as women of some dignity and individuality, very different from the alluring images of meiren hua. I have, it is true, suggested for the Eight Beauties picture (figure 2.1) that particular women might be represented in such a group composition. If so, this would be a play on generic boundaries of a type that some late-Ming figure painters and their patrons enjoyed.26 It is not inconceivable that some Qing woman would choose to have herself portrayed in the guise of a generic meiren. The author of Yangzhou Huafang Lu, Li Dou, relates a story in which a famous courtesan of that city, after many days of illness, has her portrait painted. Dissatisfied with it, she makes the artist redo it six or seven times. None of these, she says, looks like her, although all are in fact good resemblances. The next day the clever painter, instead of depicting her real appearance, portrays her in the idealized image of a beautiful woman. “You’ve got it!” she says, “You really understand me.”27 But this is an anecdote, of which the point may be the courtesan’s unwillingness to confront the ravages of illness in her face, and even if true would be an exception. The evidence we have strongly indicates that the two genres, portraiture and meiren painting, had their own separate sets of conventions, which allow us to see through the many deceptions perpetrated by dealers and others in redesignating a

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generic beautiful-woman painting, to make it more respectable and salable, as a “portrait of the famous Madame So-and-so.” (The “Madame Hedong” picture discussed below, figure 5.8, is a good example.) Since meiren paintings and quasi-meiren paintings thus figure often in MingQing novels and plays, many of them also appear in the printed illustrations to these works.28 Paintings in which meiren hanging scrolls appear are more rare; I know of only two, both by Gu Jianlong, who favored the painting-within-a-painting device. In one leaf in a part-erotic album by him, a hanging-scroll picture of The Nymph of the Luo River hangs in a woman’s bedroom.29 And in one leaf from Gu’s albums of illustrations to Jin Ping Mei, a scene in a bordello, a painting of a woman hangs on the far wall (figure 5.6). From what one can see in the reproduction, the

5.6 Probably Gu Jianlong, Li Qiao’er and Three Others in a Bordello. Leaf from the same series of illustrations to Jin Ping Mei as figure 5.4.

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woman in the picture stands at a table on which rests a book; behind her is a folding screen, and beyond that an opening into a garden, with a rock and a flowering bush. The picture-within-the-picture, that is, follows in simplified scheme the same compositional pattern that the pictures themselves typically do. These two already permit a few preliminary conjectures about the large question of where meiren paintings were hung. The posture and setting of the figure represented in the bordello-scene hanging scroll suggest that she is a cultivated woman of literary refinement; and those are just the qualities that upper-class courtesans of the same period projected, in their persons, in their writings, and sometimes in their paintings, which were typically of orchids, bamboo, and other subjects associated with literary culture. This is, then, if a bit unexpectedly, a suitable kind of meiren picture for hanging in a brothel. For a picture of The Nymph of the Luo River to be seen hanging in a woman’s boudoir as represented in an explicitly erotic picture (as Gu Jianlong’s originally was, before retouching) may also appear odd initially, since the painting’s subject seems decorous enough, even classical. But an image of the nymph could in fact represent feminine sexuality and desire; as Ellen Laing has shown, a picture of A Beauty in Spring [i.e., Erotic] Thoughts could be relabeled as The Nymph of the Luo River without anyone (until she wrote her article) finding it anomalous. 30 Moreover, the river nymph herself, in the famous fu poem, had just invited the poet down to watery dalliance, and so could be seen as fitting properly into the amorous-woman role. As with fiction and drama, we cannot simply equate the representation with the practice, assuming that the hanging of scrolls in Gu Jianlong’s pictures corresponds to how they were hung in actuality; we can only note that Gu, in choosing paintings of these subjects to include in these painted scenes, must have felt confident that they were appropriate to their settings and would be so understood by his audience. And along with the rest of his interior furnishings, the paintings he includes serve to establish appropriate moods for the narrative actions and to characterize the people engaged in them. Written sources offer a few other clues to this question. Sometimes considerations of season and occasion dictated the choice of what to hang. The calendar for monthly painting rotation included in Wen Zhenheng’s late-Ming Zhangwu Zhi (see chapter 1, “Social Functions and Status of Vernacular Paintings”) includes several references to pictures of women: “In the second moon there should be representations of ladies enjoying spring walks. . . . On the seventh evening of the seventh moon there should be displayed pictures of girls praying for skill in needlework, [and] of the Goddess of Weaving . . . while during the eleventh moon there should be paintings of . . . Yang Guifei indulging in wine, and suchlike pictures.”31 The best clues I know, however, to the code of appropriateness in the hanging of beautiful-woman paintings are found in four passages in the great eighteenth-century novel Honglou Meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber) that describe them hanging in the bedchambers of characters in the novel. 32 Two that hang in women’s rooms, Grandmother Jia’s and Qin Shi’s, are described as being by the Ming masters Qiu Ying and Tang Yin, respectively, and represent beautiful women outdoors,

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one standing in the snow, the other sleeping beneath a crab apple tree. In both period and setting, then, these belong to the Ming and early Qing meiren hua type that places the beauties in gardens or landscapes. The two hanging in the men’s bedrooms, by contrast, are both anonymous, and both are in the new illusionistic manner. One, which Baoyu (in chapter 19) sees in his Cousin Zhen’s smaller study, is described as “very lifelike,” and the other, which by chapter 41 is found hanging in Baoyu’s own bedchamber, is so convincingly three-dimensional that old Granny Liu, entering his room tipsy, mistakes it for a real girl “smiling at her in welcome,” advances toward her, and hits her head against the wall. “Strange!” she thinks, “How can they paint a picture so that it sticks out like that?” The translator, David Hawkes, interpolates, “Grannie Liu was ignorant of the foreign mode of light-andshadow painting,” and while this is not, strictly speaking, warranted by the Chinese text, it is an entirely reasonable, even astute inference—Hawkes is merely filling in for the foreign reader what the sophisticated Chinese reader of the time would surely have known, since Granny Liu’s reaction repeats exactly those of other Chinese as reported in texts, a few of which were cited in chapter 3 of this study, when they confronted for the first time pictures executed in Western-derived chiaroscuro. Even Granny Liu’s physical response follows the pattern: she was “sorely puzzled to discover, on touching the picture, that it did not in fact ‘stick out’ but was flat all over.” The two pairs of paintings differ in several revealing respects: First, in period— those hung in the women’s rooms are old paintings, with value as antiques and artworks quite apart from their subjects, whereas those in the men’s rooms, judging from their descriptions, must be up-to-date and stylish eighteenth-century pictures. Second, in authorship—those in the women’s chambers are by famous masters, while those in the men’s are anonymous, or by unnamed artists. And third, in type: relatively decorous pictures of women outdoors as against the new illusionistic images of desirable and accessible women, presumably set in interiors and meant to arouse. The paintings belong, that is, at opposite ends of the scale suggested in the previous chapter, with pictures that women might hang and enjoy at the cool end and those aimed at male viewers closer to the warm or even hot. Especially revealing is the account of Baoyu’s visit as a boy to the private chambers of his nephew’s wife Qin Shi, where he is to take a nap. She conducts him first to a room in which hangs a painting of the Han philosopher Liu Xiang reading a book, flanked by a pair of calligraphy scrolls proclaiming a Confucian motto in couplet form. Baoyu finds the subject of the painting “distasteful” and refuses to have his nap there. Qin Shi then takes him to her own bedroom, in which is hanging a painting by Tang Yin of a beautiful woman having a “spring slumber,” a sleep with an erotic dream, beneath a budding crab apple tree. The room is furnished, moreover, with objects that had once belonged to famous and amorous women of history: Wu Zetian, Zhao Feiyan, Yang Guifei, and others. Here Baoyu feels entirely comfortable; he falls asleep and has a long dream, at the end a wet dream, as

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is discovered, to the embarrassment of both, by his maid Aroma, who shortly afterward initiates him to sex and becomes his “chamber wife.”33 Some attention has been paid by art historians to the effect of hanging landscape paintings in one’s study or living space, or having them painted on the walls—we cite Chinese writers from Zong Bing in the fifth century to Guo Xi in the eleventh on how these permit imaginary ramblings in the mountains, satisfying longings for kinds of experience that may in reality be beyond realization. 34 Less has been written about how paintings of other subjects gave emotional color to the spaces in which they were hung. Baoyu’s responses to the two rooms into which Qin Shi successively led him, while particular to him and the story, are good indicators: a painting of a Confucian philosopher was meant to impart a sober, high-minded mood, that of a young woman enjoying a spring dream, an amorous mood. The former was presumably the room in which Qin Shi received visitors; we can note that scrolls of a similarly literary and Confucian character are described as hanging in the room in which another family member, Jia Tanchun, entertains guests: a Landscape in Mist and Rain by the Song scholar-artist Mi Fu, flanked with calligraphy scrolls written by the Tang calligrapher Yan Zhenqing and extolling the “true ease” and “fierce freedom” one gains by living among mountains and streams. 35 The painting of a beautiful girl—life-size and illusionistically portrayed “in the foreign mode of light and shadow”—that is described as hanging in Baoyu’s bedchamber, must have done more: besides eroticizing the room it expanded it, opening the depicted space to imagined entry. The effect of the new Westernized illusionism was in this respect not unlike that of the optically persuasive renderings of depth and atmosphere in Northern Song landscape. Both drew the viewer in imagination into longed-for realms; but the new pictures invited imaginings of amorous embrace and dalliance in place of Guo Xi’s high-minded appreciation of murmuring streams and wind in the pines. Another aspect of the new style (as it had been of Northern Song landscape), its playing-down of prominent brush drawing and subsuming of the artist’s hand into the image, facilitated that effect by rendering the picture in a mode that encouraged an engaged, “real-world” reading rather than a disengaged, aesthetic one. Baoyu’s response to the meiren painting in Cousin Zhen’s chamber, as is clear from the text, is to imagine her a real woman: “Finding himself alone, he began thinking about a certain painting he remembered having seen in Cousin Zhen’s ‘smaller study’. It was a very life-like portrait of a beautiful woman. While everyone was celebrating, he reflected, she was sure to have been left on her own and would perhaps be feeling lonely. He would go and have a look at her and cheer her up.”36 Instead, his visit to the study accidentally exposes him to the more actively arousing sight of two servants having sex there. As for the painting in Baoyu’s own bedroom, in order for it to deceive Granny Liu it had to have been nearly life-size, as the women in meiren pictures of this kind

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frequently are. An anonymous picture of a servant girl bringing a jar of wine, though a lesser work than we can imagine Baoyu’s to have been, can serve as a stand-in for the fictional painting, since it probably dates from about the time the author, Cao Xueqin, was writing, the mid- or later eighteenth century, and might well have been regarded by viewers of that time as “very lifelike” (figure 5.7). 37 The coloring of the girl’s face is unusually naturalistic; her garments, in their colors and their gold and embroidered designs, reproduce those of real clothing; and their shaded folds, together with the volumetric shading on the jar she holds out before her, must represent the kind of illusionism Cao Xueqin had in mind when he conceived Baoyu’s painting. The male viewer can read the girl’s expression, with sideward look and head turned partly away, as shy but submissive, exactly the combination that would stimulate his imaginings. The suggestive opening of her sleeve

5.7 Anonymous (mid-eighteenth century), Girl Bringing a Jar of Wine. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 147.3 x 65.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913 (13.330.25). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(cf. figure 5.5) confirms the enticement that can, if one chooses, be read into the painting. Another aid to imagining how Baoyu’s painting might have looked, and an example of even stronger illusionism, is the work inscribed by Wang Chengpei in 1805 (figure 3.23). Since it is more than two meters in height, the image of the standing woman must approach life size—or, more properly, the right size for a woman standing a short distance beyond the “opening” of the picture plane. The extraordinary illusionism with which the entryway is portrayed—the relief effect of the latticework on the door, the long table, the vase on its stand, the hanging-scroll painting fastened to the wall with decorative clips, the painting itself, the patterns of the scroll mounting and the wallpaper—persuade us that we ourselves, slightly tipsy and in semidarkness, might well mistake it for a real extension of our own space, much as we sometimes misread a large mirror on a restaurant wall as an opening into a farther room. And, especially if we were better attuned to Chinese representations of figures and less blasé about lifelike portrayals, we might even mistake the woman momentarily for a real one. Even though they belong to a fictional construction, then, the passages in Hong­ lou Meng reveal a good deal about how meiren paintings were hung, enjoyed, and understood in the eighteenth century. The author of the novel, Cao Xueqin, lived his early years in Nanjing, not far from Yangzhou, and probably knew paintings of the type represented by “Shi’s beauties,” the ones that Shi Pangzi (as noted at the beginning of chapter 2) was producing for a clientele chiefly made up of women in the Yangzhou pleasure quarter. One can hope that Cao’s account will be corroborated and augmented by further discoveries of relevant passages in Qing literary sources, and that in time these will allow firmer distinctions in social and economic level, as well as gender, among the purchasers or “consumers” of the paintings. Even now it is clear that they ranged from people of middle income and below who bought the inexpensive popular prints now called nianhua, in which meiren were a common subject, up to the members of wealthy households such as the Jia family of Cao Xueqin’s novel, and even higher, to the imperial court and the emperor himself. The information on paintings of women hanging in women’s chambers, the representation of a Nymph of the Luo River picture hanging in a woman’s boudoir, and the account of the Yangzhou pleasure-quarter women making up the main clientele for Shi Pangzi’s portraits and pictures of beauties, all raise again the question of paintings done primarily for a female audience. For women to prefer pictures of women hanging in their living quarters is understandable enough, and also that those pictures should be non-erotic or only mildly erotic in character. Upper-class women would also, presumably, have preferred the pictures to represent guixiu or gentry women, and to include some indications of their personal concerns and feelings, even when there are implications as well of their continuing subordination to men in many aspects of their lives. Another subgenre presumably suited to female owners and viewers was pictures of women waiting for absent husbands and lovers. These might, when sensitively

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and sympathetically portrayed, correspond to the real feelings and personal situation of a female audience: women were left behind in the home for long periods, sometimes years, when men traveled as officials, merchants, or sojourners seeking employment outside their home regions. 38 But paintings of this type could also, in the hands of an artist with a different clientele in mind, be blatant images of male imaginings. A comparable overlap of expressive purpose can be seen in poetry: Paul Ropp writes, “many poems by gentry wives in the late imperial period . . . chronicle their long days of lonely pining for [their husband’s] return. Many of these poems are little different from the ‘male fantasy’ poems of earlier periods, depicting women devastated by love and longing. The women’s poems, however, demonstrate a greater range of response than the single note of lonely pining.”39 We cannot, therefore, assume that any particular type was directed at one or the other gender, since any type could be adapted in either direction. From the discussion above, and even more from the treatments of particular paintings below, it will be clear that no single set of criteria will provide an adequate framework for categorizing and organizing meiren paintings. The kind of information that would permit standard museum-style assignment to period, region or school, and individual hand is usually absent from these works, or deceptive when it appears to be provided—most of them, after spurious attributions and misidentifications of subjects are stripped away, are left “floating free.” Thematic variants within the large genre of meiren, expressively calculated choices of setting and attributes, considerations of intended viewership, and intensity of erotic charge all rendered them appropriate for hanging in different places and viewing by different audiences. The discussion of meiren hua that follows will keep these issues in mind while moving back and forth between two scales that do not by any means correlate neatly with each other: the chronological, or dating, when it seems ascertainable and appropriate; and a mostly rising scale of erotic content or charge— beginning with relatively cool pictures of self-absorbed beauties in outdoor settings, moving indoors to their boudoirs, observing how implications of sexual invitation are encoded in the pictures, arriving at paintings of women alone who somehow betray, and eventually are consumed by, sexual longings. Some of the last already constitute a kind of soft-core erotica; to move into a consideration of the truly hard-core erotic paintings would take us the next step, and reveal that these, too, prove to have their own range of types and intensities. On the question of audience, we can begin with a loose assumption, based on indicators like those already cited, that cool pictures were more likely to have appealed to women and to have been enjoyed and used by them, as well as by less lubriciously minded males; and that hot pictures were directed more particularly at male viewers, and were meant to arouse. We are not yet ready to make a coherent argument about how the various factors affecting this complex and absorbing arthistorical development—the passage of time, the acquisition of new techniques including Western illusionistic techniques, the decline and commercialization of the courtesan culture, the rise of gentry women to greater prominence in cultural

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circles, perhaps the appropriation by men (and artists who catered to their desires) of types of painting that had earlier been directed in large part toward women— interacted to provide conditions for the production of the paintings we have. More paintings, and more study, should move us eventually beyond the dangers of premature formulations.

Sorting out the Paintings

Of all the major genres that were popular in Ming-Qing painting, pictures of meiren have received the least attention, either in China or outside. They have always been ranked far down in estimation among the genres of painting. Modern Chinese scholars have tended to regard them as trivial and a bit shameful, representing an aspect of their culture best left unexplored. They lump them all, along with portraits and portrayals of upper-class women and imagined pictures of notable women of the past, under the single term shinu hua (gentlewoman paintings), without attempting to differentiate them or to eliminate from them pictures of women who are notably unladylike in their appearance and implied behavior. The burgeoning of feminist scholarship in Western art history has motivated a few attempts to treat the pictures from that perspective; but the obstacles already mentioned—so many of the best of them being misattributed, misdated, laden with misleading inscriptions and seals, even misidentified in subject, besides being unpublished, at least in easily accessible sources—have confined these studies largely to acceptable works by name artists, or to paintings produced within the Imperial Academy, in other words, to safe but relatively unexciting regions. The works that are visually stunning and expressively complex are likely, for reasons that lie at the core of our investigation, to “float free” in period, authorship, and subject, and need to be painstakingly pinned down and decoded. It might be asked: Why is it important to pin them down at all? Why not let them continue to float free? So-called diachronic studies, aimed at establishing lineages and developmental patterns and stylistic sequences, are unpopular in art history today, as is the practice of connoisseurship that supports them. Even the term art history is under fire: why does art need to have a history? The answer is obvious once we look beyond the special exigencies of our discipline as they are currently perceived. If the works are to be studied in a larger social context, as they obviously should be, the context must be the right one. As outlined at the beginning of this chapter, great changes occurred between late Ming and mid-Qing in the courtesan culture, in attitudes toward women, literacy in women, the increasing commercialization of the pleasure districts. Geographical context is also important: all these and other matters were, no doubt, differently construed in the Jiangnan cities and in the north; and so forth. A single example of the consequences of misidentification of period, artist, and subject will illustrate this point. One of the best known and finest of surviving meiren paintings bears an inscription identifying it as the work of a certain Wu Zhuo, and as a portrait of the famous

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courtesan-poet Liu Yin or Liu Rushi (1618–64), painted in 1643 (figure 5.8). But the inscription is clearly an interpolation, probably added when the painting was cut down from a larger size, with the aim of making it more marketable and deserving of a place in a serious collection.40 It is not a portrait of anyone, but a generic meiren painting, datable by style to the mid-eighteenth century or a bit later and recognizable as a product of what we term the northern school of figure painting. The existence of another version, currently known only from an old publication, which preserves the complete composition, would in itself argue against its being a portrait. This other version bears an inscription claiming it to be a self-portrait of another famous courtesan, Ma Shouzhen (1548–1604; figure 5.9).41 A published article and an unpublished master’s thesis that took the “Liu Rushi” painting as a focus have both gone off track through accepting the false inscription, reaching conclusions that cannot be sustained once the real character and art-historical placement of the work have been determined.42 The resemblances between this painting and the Western Wing picture discussed earlier (figure 5.1)—in the drapery drawing, the faces, the meticulous portrayal of gold ornaments, textile patterns, spotted bamboo (the chair in one, the fan frame in the other)—suggest that these are products, if not of the same master, at least of the same atelier. The Guanyin on a Lotus Leaf (figure 4.29) belongs to the same stylistic group, and the large family New Year’s scene (figure 4.5) is at least close to it. All are probably the work of some master or studio in the lineage of Leng Mei and Cui Hui, working in the Beijing area in the mid-eighteenth century and after. The possibility of a Leng Mei studio continuing after the master himself had returned to service in the Imperial Academy was raised in chapter 2 (“Northern Figure Masters in and out of the Academy”); these may be the products of such a studio. At present there appears to be no way of getting beyond that conjecture, since, to my knowledge, no painting in this style bears a signature or seals that would allow a safe attribution to any particular artist. We can hope that evidence will turn up in future to allow a closer dating and art-historical identification of this important group of paintings.43 In any case, identifying hands of particular masters is not in itself my aim; in the few instances where it proves possible for meiren paintings, it is useful mainly for allowing us to reach tentative understandings of local or regional styles and traditions—Suzhou, Yangzhou, or northern (Hebei/Shandong)—and for providing a chronological-geographical framework to which free-floating works, by far the majority, can be attached. As we might expect, in different times and places different styles were used for depicting beautiful women, their attire, and their accoutrements, just as in Japanese ukiyo’e paintings and prints, for which ample evidence and voluminous studies have made more precise identifications possible. Already, however, a large chronological pattern can be marked. From pictures that place women in the relatively neutral space of gardens, we observe a shift to pictures that locate them indoors, viewed voyeuristically through windows, usually round; and from these to compositions that situate them in their boudoirs within

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5.8 Anonymous, perhaps a follower of Leng Mei (mid- or later eighteenth century), Beautiful Woman in Her Boudoir (falsely titled Portrait of Mme. Hedong, i.e., Liu Rushi or Liu Yin, 1618–64; interpolated inscription with signature of Wu Zhuo and date 1643). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 119.5 x 62.3 cm. Harvard Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Oriental Objects Fund, 1968.40. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

5.9 Anonymous, perhaps a follower of Leng Mei, Beautiful Woman in Her Boudoir. Complete version of same composition as figure 5.8; inscription falsely claiming it to be a self-portrait of Ma Shouzhen (1548–1604). From Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 1 (1912): 58.

elaborately constructed interiors, giving the viewer an even greater sense of easy entry and visual appropriation. Along with these shifts in the women’s settings, ways are devised of depicting the woman so as to increase her attractiveness and our access to her, drawing on Western techniques for making her seem palpable and setting her in a readable, believable space. This pattern will be only outlined here, since it provides a relatively firm framework on which, in future studies of the urban studio artists’ output, more materials can be attached and smoother continuities constructed. A brief look at three of the unattributed, free-floating works of meiren painting can serve to demonstrate this organizing procedure. One is in the old collection of the Princeton University Art Museum; another is known to me only from an old photograph in the archive there; and a third is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Scholar and Beauty with Peonies and Rabbits is the oldest in type, and the least sophisticated (figure 5.10). It must be the work of a Suzhou minor master of the late Ming or early Qing, a follower of Qiu Ying and his daughter Qiu Zhu; the figures, and especially their faces—the woman’s lopsided, with a slightly simpering smile and raised eyebrows—are often seen in lesser late products of the Qiu Ying school. But the shaded folds of the garments, and the three-dimensional drawing of balustrade and furniture, notably the stand holding the books, make it unlikely that the picture is earlier than the mid-seventeenth century. This is a decoratively beautiful but expressively unsubtle presentation of the caizi jiaren (scholar-andbeauty) theme in its basic form. The two of them are placed in a garden, he holding a book from which he has been reading to her, she seated beside her qin or zither. Both of them are gazing at the pair of rabbits, of which the larger male looks fixedly at the smaller female, signaling the intensity of their amorous attachment (cf. the cats in Zhang Zhen’s painting, figure 2.6). Full-blown white and red peonies, absurdly large and blatant in their sexual message, along with a banana plant, add to the lush, summery atmosphere. If we look from this work to the thematically similar (but indoor) picture of the Western Wing principals (figure 5.1), we realize how much has been gained over the intervening century in flexibility, nuance, sheer elegance.44 A Woman Washing Her Hands, with Her Maid belongs also within the Suzhou tradition, but appears to reveal the transformation of that school manner at the hands of Gu Jianlong (figure 5.11). The portrayal of the woman, her face a simple oval with high forehead and delicate features, and the clearly readable spatial integration of figures and furniture agree so closely with those aspects of Gu’s paintings, including his erotic albums, as to permit a tentative attribution to him or a close follower. The structuring of the picture so that it can be read as a moment in an undefined narrative—a device that imbues it with a quiet sense of mystery and holds the viewer’s attention and imagination longer than the Scholar and Beauty could—seems also to have been an innovation of Gu Jianlong, since it is characteristic of his paintings but cannot easily be found earlier. It will continue to be true, as we will see, of the best

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5.10 Anonymous (mid-seventeenth century), Scholar and Beauty with Peonies and Rabbits. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk. Princeton University Art Museum, gift of DuBois Schanck Morris, Class of 1893 (y1947-279). Photo by Bruce M. White; © Trustees of Princeton University.

meiren and erotic paintings from this time onward. The scene here is the woman’s boudoir, the time night, as indicated by the sky seen through the window. The woman is washing her hands in a basin on a stand; the cylindrical container in front of her appears to hold black and white stone pieces for the weiqi (go) board, suggesting that she has just finished a game. She is looking into a large mirror (hung on a stand made from an ornamental “scholar’s” rock) while her maid appears to be holding out a towel. We can envisage the woman between bouts of play with her husband or lover, moving from game board to dressing table to bed. Regardless of whether this reading is what the artist intended, it is the kind of reading that pictures by Gu Jianlong and later specialists in meiren and erotic paintings are able to stimulate through skillful manipulation of setting, attributes, and posture, for effects of greater subtlety and depth than were possible before. The third of the free-floating meiren paintings, Beauty Seated on a Rock in a Gar­ den, Holding a Fan, lacks setting and attributes (figure 5.12); but their absence is almost certainly due to its having been cut down, as the “Liu Rushi” painting was (figure 5.8). In both cases the effect of the cutting is to bring the woman closer to the picture plane for a more immediate visual impact, eliminating what might be, for viewers of later periods (who had forgotten how to read them), distracting surroundings. Also, the excisions may have permitted the presentation of the picture as a “portrait of a lady”—but at the expense of just those pictorial indicators or indexes that enveloped the image in rich resonances for its original viewers. As it survives, the painting presents the woman in a meditative mood, holding a fan in one hand, with the other perhaps holding her bound foot beneath her robe (cf. figure 4.27). She gazes abstractedly at nothing; but judging from related complete compositions that survive, she may originally have been looking at something that provided an external referent and focus for her inner state—such as, for instance, the pair of cats that hold the attention of the woman at the window in Zhang Zhen’s painting (figure 2.6). Its similarity to the work by Zhang Zhen is in fact the best clue for dating and placing the painting—once more, the treatment of face, hair, and costume correspond, with the facial features larger and more naturally distributed than in the two Suzhou school paintings (figures 5.10 and 5.11), the eyes given a look of inwardness and intelligence, the mouth curving in a rueful half-smile. In these respects and in her whole mien of dignity, she is in fact a city cousin of the “Yongzheng’s consorts” women (figures 2.9 and 2.10). As more examples are located and identified, we may be able to discern an early eighteenth-century Yangzhou type of meiren, with its extensions into the northern court. At any rate, we can note, in support of the argument, the appearance of similar qualities in the meiren paintings by Yu Zhiding, another Yangzhou master who was active in Beijing about this same time, two of which will be introduced below (figures 5.16 and 5.18). Another essentially anonymous painting that can take its place among the masterworks of the genre, and represent an even further degree of refinement, is the Woman Resting from Reading (also called Portrait of a Lady) in the British Mu­ seum (figure 5.13). Although it bears seals of Leng Mei, it is another that appears

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5.11 Possibly Gu Jianlong or a close follower, A Woman Washing Her Hands, with Her Maid. Photo from the Prince­ ton University Department of Art and Archaeology photo archive; collection unknown.

5.12 Anonymous (early eighteenth century), Beauty Seated on a Rock in a Garden, Holding a Fan. Hanging scroll (cut down), ink and colors on silk, 134.7 x 63.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo Ross Collection, 25.515. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

5.13

stylistically later than Leng Mei’s period of activity, and the image of the woman, especially her face, does not agree with the distinctive type seen in Leng’s safely signed works. She looks, moreover, more urbane and complex than Leng Mei’s women, less innocent. The time and care lavished on fine details suggest a studio mode of production.45 But to observe this is not to imply, as is commonly the case, that the painting is therefore cruder or more conventionalized than one entirely from the master’s hand would have been. On the contrary, like some others with problematic Leng Mei seals, the work is of very high quality. The elegance of its conception and execution, along with the aristocratic bearing of the woman and the fact that she looks up from reading a book, must have encouraged the assumption, reflected in the Portrait of a Lady title given to the painting (presumably in recent times), that it is a portrayal of a particular gentlewoman. But it cannot be; no respectable woman would have permitted herself to be portrayed in this manner, with clothing loosened, décolletage partly bare, and knees apart. The face, moreover, for all its loveliness, is generic, not individualized. The woman’s demeanor is, again, cool. She rests her chin ever so lightly against her hand, as meditating bodhisattvas do in Northern Wei sculptures, while meeting our gaze with her own, pensive and free of enticement. The sensual allure of the painting is not so much in the woman as in details that visually seduce the viewer: the pupils of her eyes, drawn sharp and piercing; the flowers in her hair; her earrings; the fine design drawn in white on her translucent robe. Delicate patterns in pale ink emerge as one moves over the picture, looking more closely: the woven cover of her rootwood couch, the marbled top of the shelf on which she leans. Small touches bring twinges of delight: on the edge of her book turned toward us, the thinner and thicker black bars printed over the fold of each page produce, together, two blurred, vertical markings across the compressed pages, made up of tiny horizontal lines. A sight familiar enough to readers of Chinese books has here been brought to the level of awareness through being represented in a painting. As we will continue to see, visual refinements of this kind are not at all uncommon in meiren paintings, and belie the charge of crudity sometimes brought against them. All the meiren pictures considered so far have been unattributed or wrongly attributed, in need of art-historical placement. Those that follow are mostly reliably signed works, or are identifiable by artists’ seals or by close similarity to safely attributable works. These will be used to draw, loosely and provisionally, a chronological pattern for this genre, but also to analyze some of the means by which its expressive and erotic effects are achieved.

Anonymous, follower of Leng Mei (false seals of Leng Mei), Woman Resting from Reading. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 163 x 97 cm. The British Museum, London, ­Wegener Collection. © The Trustees of The British Museum.

Cool to Warmer Paintings

“Cool” pictures of beautiful women include those in which she waits patiently for her lover to come, sometimes playing a solitary game of weiqi, or simply sits as if abstracted, usually in a mildly provocative posture and often in some degree of dishabille, perhaps putting down a book to gaze almost, but not quite, out at the viewer.

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We can read into these cool meiren pictures what we wish; the artist withholds the clues or indicators that would make their messages more explicit. Paintings of this kind might well have hung in the chambers of women. The pictures can heat up when the woman in them is seen to be sexually aroused by some sight, perhaps a pair of coupling animals (rabbits, cats, dogs, even butterflies or moths). In the cooler form of the same theme, in which the creatures are only playing amorously or regarding one another, they serve to remind her of the happiness of which she is deprived by her lover’s absence. She can also be turned on by reading a book of erotic fiction or poems. Whatever the stimulus, her perceived arousal renders her more open to the male viewer’s imagined advances. Alternatively, the woman may signal her availability through gestures or attributes. “Hot” pictures may suggest that she is masturbating, or experiencing a melting degree of sexual heat, however produced. The male viewer’s scopophilic pleasure may also be heightened by revealing the woman partially disrobed, or wrapped in a gauzy robe, as before the bath. Meiren pictures of the late Ming and early Qing are mostly set outdoors, and mostly situate the beautiful woman in a garden, seated on a rock. Within that type, an unprecedented range of expressive resources opens up, as can be illustrated by a small group of examples that are ascribable to known artists and are at least roughly datable. The oldest, a solitary survival from what must have been a copious output of work of this kind, is A Fairy Beauty at Quiet Rest, painted in 1640 by a minor artist from Fukien named Huang Shifu (figure 5.14). The artist has inscribed on it a poem (translated by Andrea Goldman): Dimly one perceives a wafting of faint fragrance— Who knows what troubles the fairy beauty’s heart? A furrow on her brow turns the azure waters cold, A smile on her face disperses the mist and wind. She does not speak, yet her love is sincere; She blushes but entices a tacit intimacy. When shall we meet in the garden behind your boudoir, And talk among the mists and crimson clouds?

The artist adds a dedication to a certain “old Mr. Can” and the note that this is the eighteenth scroll, presumably of a series. Was it, then, one of a set of paintings representing Mr. Can’s concubines, or were they famous courtesans of some pleasure district, or a catalog of types of beauty, like the print series designed by Utamaro in eighteenth-century Japan? Whatever the subjects of the pictures, they must have belonged to some ukiyo’e-like genre of paintings that celebrated, presumably, the newly flourishing culture of courtesans and romantic love. The poem implies depths and subtleties that seem to go beyond those of the painting: the young woman’s provocative pose and direct gaze into the viewer’s eyes, the exposure of her upper body through the translucent jacket, and the winsome gesture, common in meiren paintings (cf. figures 5.17 and 5.20), of touching her little finger to the corner of her mouth, all turn her image into a fairly blatant icon of sexual invitation.

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5.14 Huang Shifu (active mid-seventeenth century), A Fairy Beauty at Quiet Rest. Dated 1640. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 133.4 x 62.2 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

A decidedly cooler but more poetically moving meiren picture painted by Gu Jianlong in 1683 is Beautiful Woman with Rocks, Tree, and Bamboo (figure 5.15). It presents a mature, refined-looking lady, removed some distance from the viewer, seated on a rock in a strangely desolate-looking garden. That it is a garden is indicated by the two taihu-shi, large stones heavily eroded into bizarrely hollowed shapes that were brought from the shores of the Taihu or Great Lake near Suzhou to be set up as evocative ornaments in gardens. But the twisted old tree and the bamboo grove dimly visible beyond the lady seem to belong rather to a wilderness, and suggest that the garden—and by implication the lady—has been ill-tended, or even abandoned, for a long while. Her light brown, unpatterned robe and undecorated fan allow her to blend modestly into her surroundings. Like the “fairy beauty,” she touches the corner of her mouth with one little finger, but her raised eyebrows and sidelong look convey inwardness and a delicate melancholy. Despite her slight smile, she projects no look of welcome. Garden rocks that are commonly portrayed as elegant and sculptural here appear sharply angled, and instead seem harsh, as does the tangled tree. Surely this is a woman left too long alone, enduring loneliness and preserving her fading beauty for the return of her husband. Once more we can observe Gu Jianlong calculating exquisitely the implications and expressive effect of his materials, and organizing them faultlessly. Making all the elements of a richly complex composition work together for a focused effect is not easy; it is what the artist of the Scholar and Beauty with Peonies and Rabbits (figure 5. 10) attempted with only partial success, and Gu Jianlong accomplishes as if effortlessly. It is superbly achieved also in a hitherto unknown work by Yu Zhiding, Woman in a Weed-Grown Garden Gazing at Rabbits (figure 5.16).46 Datable to about the same time as Gu Jianlong’s work, it portrays the womanwaiting theme with unusual directness and poignancy by setting it in a garden overgrown with weeds as a metaphor for the situation of the woman, who, like Gu Jianlong’s beauty, has been abandoned or kept too long waiting by her husband or lover. The convention of the weedy garden as a setting for the neglected woman is an old one: we may recall the unfortunate Lady Suetsumuhana in The Tale of Genji.47 The theme is also long established in Chinese poetry, in which we read of women who love excessively and, being rejected, lapse into passivity and decline, blaming themselves and retreating into seclusion. The woman in this painting is doing nothing more than sitting on a rock, one leg drawn up (like the “Liu Rushi” figure and others), sleeve-covered hands in her lap, her melancholy gaze directed at three rabbits on the ground. Two white ones, presumably females, wrestle playfully, while the third, identified as the male by its larger size and darker color, looks intently and purposefully at them. (One wonders immediately: Why two white rabbits, instead of the more romantic one? Is the woman forced somehow to share the absent man’s love?) The proliferation of weeds, mineral green against the otherwise somber graybrown coloring, and the way so many of them grow inward ­toward her from the rocks in an almost threatening way, deny her the bowerlike setting that a garden customarily provides. At the same time, the extraordinary decorative beauty of the

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5.15 Gu Jianlong, Beautiful Woman with Rocks, Tree, and Bamboo. Dated 1683. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on silk, 113 x 49 cm. Private collection.

painting, in which one reads the fading and wasted beauty of the neglected woman, strengthens its emotional impact. The woman’s facial expression combines bitterness with resignation in the slightly knitted brow, narrowed eyes, and wry smile. An essay refuting the belief that the faces of beauties in Chinese paintings are uniformly bland and expressionless might begin with this one. The drapery drawing, which may seem heavyhanded and mannered at first, especially in the rumpled sleeves, proves on longer looking to augment the whole effect of harshness. Like others of the best meiren hua in the early period, this one can be read as an externalization of an inner state. For a female viewer, it could be a sympathetic portrayal of another woman, arousing empathy; for the male, it offered not only an attractive object of gaze but also a sense of seeing into her feelings. What could be a companion picture if it were not for the difference in sizes, so similar in numerous telling features of style that the two can be considered products of the same hand, is Woman Reading in a Garden, catalogued as an “Anony-

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mous Ming” work in the National Palace Museum, Taipei (figure 5.17). It can be reattributed, on the basis of this close resemblance, to Yu Zhiding, and dated to the early Qing period. The young woman portrayed here, sitting in a garden on a warm summer day, looks up pensively from her reading, idly distracted by two butterflies hovering above the flowers nearby, a large bird singing on a branch of the tong tree above, and a white cat on the ground intently watching the end of her sash flutter in the breeze. None of these disturbs her reverie; her mood is one of hopeful expectation, as the other woman’s is of despair: her lover will come. The distinctive faces, though not the expressions, of the women in the two paintings are virtually identical. The drawing of the robes is also similar, even to the scalloped outlines and repeated folds, but here the drapery lines flow more smoothly, in keeping with the different expressive intent. A very high level of workmanship can be seen in the patterns of cloth in both, as well as in the surface patterns such as the one (a conglomerate stone?) on the table in the summer scene. The two pictures could even be taken as a contrasting pair, representing fortunate and unfortunate love, negative and positive versions of the “woman waiting” theme. The general pattern from this time on is toward a heightening of erotic content, as the means for doing so are developed in the repertories of artists who paint these pictures. The Gu Jianlong work and the two by Yu Zhiding, however poignant, appear relatively decorous and mild beside those of the “Liu Rushi” type (figure 5.8) from the eighteenth century. The earlier artists used oblique, poetic ways of conveying their romantic or erotic messages; the women, although their expressive postures and sizes within the compositions permit stronger feelings of empathy than did still earlier (Ming-period) meiren paintings, are shown as selfcontained, projecting no overt invitation to the viewer. (Huang Shifu’s Fairy Beauty is atypical in this regard.) The move from these to the eighteenth-century type, as suggested before, is a process of “turning up the heat”—intensifying the erotic appeal of the image, making it for male viewers a more overtly effective icon of the courtesan-concubine ideal. For female viewers, we can speculate, much was lost in that process. Paintings of women in their boudoirs can also be seen in the early Qing period, such as Wang Qiao’s work of 1657 (figure 1.6).48 Along with the leaves in early erotic albums, they are among the indications of a newly reawakened interest among Chinese painters in interiors with figures, a genre that had scarcely been essayed seriously for centuries. Now, inspired in considerable part by foreign pictures that offered new techniques for clarifying and complicating the interior spaces and positioning the figures more effectively within them, the Chinese studio masters take up once more this kind of composition, and develop it in two directions. One, represented by the “Qiu Ying” album (figures 4.26–28) and some related paintings, opens quiet domestic spaces within which quotidian events and situations take place. These, we have speculated, would appear to have answered to the interests of women, and to have intended women to be the principal viewers. In

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5.16

5.17

Yu Zhiding (1647–1710 or after),

Probably Yu Zhiding (old attribution

Woman in a Weed-Grown Garden

to Zhou Wenju, Five Dynasties, now

Gazing at Rabbits. Two seals of

catalogued as “Anonymous Ming”),

the artist in lower left. Hanging

Woman Reading in a Garden. Hanging

scroll, ink and colors on silk,

scroll, ink and colors on silk, 180.9 x

160 x 81 cm. Shanghai Museum

102.1 cm. National Palace Museum,

(reg. no. 54859).

Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China.

a­ nother direction, the interior space functions as a boudoir setting for the beautiful woman presented as an object of desire. The first datable example of this meiren type, common later, in which the woman is not only placed indoors but brought up close and made iconic is another painting by Yu Zhiding, dated to 1697 (figure 5.18). The lamp, and the shadowy areas not fully illuminated by it, make this a night scene; the woman, an orchid in her hair and her sleeve-covered hand raised to her cheek in a time-honored gesture for women awaiting the return of husbands or lovers, passes her lonely time, like the woman in Yin Shi’s painting of 1745 (figure 2.2), sitting at the weiqi (go) game board, plotting her strategy in the absence of her partner.49 Recessed spaces beneath the table and behind the woman, opening between the curtain at right and the folding screen at left, draw the observer’s gaze briefly into them. As I argued in chapter 3, these devices cannot easily be found within the Chinese artists’ own tradition, and were almost certainly inspired by European pictures that were to be seen in China by this time. It is probably significant that Yu Zhiding was in Beijing when he painted this in 1697, not as a court artist but with access to circles in which he could have viewed these foreign pictures, as well as, perhaps, the new hybrid or semi-Europeanized works being painted by Jiao Bingzhen and other proper Imperial Academy masters. From this work by Yu Zhiding to one by Jiao Bingzhen (figure 3.19) and from that to Leng Mei’s boudoir scene (figure 3.13, cf. 3.14) and another by Leng to be considered below (figure 5.20), which is dated to 1724—paintings that represent the fully mature eighteenth-century type—is a smooth, easily understandable development. Since Leng Mei was working for patronage outside the court in this period (as Yu Zhi­ding and sometimes Jiao Bingzhen had done before him), and since neither Leng’s paintings nor Yu’s and Jiao’s are inscribed with the formula indicating that they were done for the emperor, it appears to have been a development that did not take place primarily within the Imperial Academy, but among the city painters working for a clientele of well-off merchants, imperial relatives, and other members of an urban elite. Seeing Yu Zhiding’s picture in color (as it appears here reproduced that way for the first time) reveals how effectively he has used his mostly muted colors to render space and atmosphere. It is done in predominantly cool tones but with brighter accents: the patterned blue curtain, the violet of her robe touched with stronger blue at its collar, a glimpse of red at her sleeve, and a broad hem of red securing it firmly to the floor below; the yellow-brown of the bronze lamp, the white of the go pieces and of the exposed sleeves of her undergarment. The violet is repeated, paler, in the border mounting of the screen beyond. Ink monochrome renderings of the rectangular slabs of dali shi—white marble with natural markings resembling mountaintops and clouds—set into the seat back behind her are echoed in the bamboo painted in darker and paler ink on the screen behind, a visual exemplification of man’s handiwork repeating a creation of nature. Smoothly graded ink-wash around and behind her head, shading into but independent of the screen painting, creates a sense of space that must have seemed striking to viewers of Yu Zhiding’s time, and still works visually for us. Only the artist’s failure to shadow the space under the

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5.18 Yu Zhiding, Woman at a Weiqi Board. Dated 1697. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 176.5 x 167 cm. Tianjin Museum.

5.19 Anonymous, Chinese Woman in an Interior, with a Bird. Illustration to Athanasius Kircher, China Monumen­ tis . . . illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667). Copperplate engraving. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

table and his awkward placement of the woman’s lower body within it (like Cui Hui’s similar failure, cf. figure 3.20) impede our easy reading of the composition. It is amusing and instructive to compare Yu Zhiding’s painting with an anonymous picture of a similar subject done thirty years earlier by an unidentified European artist and included as an engraving illustrating Athanasius Kircher’s China Monumentis . . . illustrata, published in Amsterdam in 1667 (figure 5.19). That Kircher had never gone to China (he traveled to Rome to see materials brought back by the Jesuits) did not inhibit his writing a book-length description of it, nor did the European artist’s ignorance of how a Chinese woman in her boudoir might look prevent him from doing two detailed pictures of that subject. 50 The European artist knew better than Yu Zhiding how to depict the shadowed space under a piece of furniture, but appears clueless about how Chinese hanging scrolls were displayed, draping one of them awkwardly over the edge of the table. Yu Zhiding would not have made that mistake, but had some difficulty fitting the woman believably into the newfound space. Each artist understood something, that is, of the other’s picto-

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rial repertory, but not enough to avoid awkwardness in the eyes of anyone familiar with both traditions. I do not suggest that either artist knew the other’s work, but only want to demonstrate the lively interchange of pictures between Europe and China in this period, an interchange best documented, and best traced, not in written sources but in the pictures themselves. The artist of an erotic album painted about the same time presumably lifted the device of using checkerboard flooring to strongly mark a receding ground plane from a foreign source such as the plate in Kircher’s book.51 Another early, though undated, example of a meiren painting in which the woman is shown in her boudoir is the example by Jiao Bingzhen (figure 3.19), probably a late work by Jiao, painted in the 1720s. Jiao, unlike Yu Zhiding, had no difficulty fitting his figure comfortably into the interior space, created here by furniture and its relation to the figure itself, and backed by a wall defined only by a round window at left, through which one glimpses bamboo growing outside. The woman is engaged in arranging sprigs of blossoming plum and camellia, both flowers of early spring, in a bronze container; a bronze hu vessel on the table at left holds two rolled papers, and a large ceramic pot with crackled glaze at lower right may be a wine pot. For the woman to be so absorbed in her quiet pursuit might seem to shield her from any implication of sexual availability and place the picture in the cool range; doubtless some viewers saw it that way. But the articulation of her body beneath the robe and the exquisite beauty of her face, with its pale flush of rose; the access opened by the readable foreground space; and most of all the openness with which the artist presents her to our gaze render her far more captivating than the woman in Yu Zhiding’s 1697 painting. By contrast, the court ladies in the pictures Jiao Bingzhen produced as an Imperial Academy master (figures 3.9 and 3.10) appear, in keeping with their very different roles, bodiless and dehumanized. Out here, working in a less formal manner and making a picture probably not intended for public display, Jiao created one of the subtlest and most beguiling of meiren paintings. Earlier I rejected as a work of Leng Mei a fine painting in the British Museum that bears his seals (figure 5.13). More convincing as from his hand, since it matches Leng’s other signed works closely in the depiction of the face and in some features of style, is a painting dated to 1724 (figure 5.20). Regardless of whether it is later than Jiao Bingzhen’s (figure 3.19), it represents a distinct increase in “heating up.” Here the woman leans on a table, kneeling with her right leg on a barrel-seat, striking a pose even more provocative than that of the woman in the “Liu Rushi” picture (figure 5.8). Her head is cocked and rests on her hand, the little finger touching her lips. The elegant pattern of curving lines created by her pose and the fall of her dress is set off against the crotchety outlines of the rootwood stand (the same contrast is used in the British Museum’s “Leng Mei” picture); the linear pattern creates in itself an effect of voluptuousness, quite apart from the slender and supple body implied beneath it. This kind of sensuality has little in common with the warm and glowing masses of flesh of the Titian-Rubens-Renoir imagery of European ­painting,

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5.20 Leng Mei (ca. 1670–1742 or after), Beautiful Woman in an Interior, with a Dog. Dated 1724. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 175 x 104 cm. Tianjin Museum.

and answers to a very different sensibility. The woman holds a book, which proves to be, when the quite legible text on it is read, a book of love poetry titled Close to Midnight.52 Rolled and pointed into her groin, it is obviously phallic in function. Other erotic indicators in the picture—hibiscus flowers, flute, Buddha’s-hand fruit in the dish beside her, the theme of putting down the book for a moment to gaze out as if abstractedly—are more oblique; this one, once noticed, is almost blatant. One is struck again by the determined misconstruction that dictates the assignment of such pictures today to a neutral “gentlewoman” category, and by the unwillingness

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of writers about them to notice what is going on in them. The extra­ordinary pictorial illusionism that the painting displays—in its space; in the rendering of the furniture; in the shaded cylindricality of the flute; in the shadowy places beneath the table, inside the barrel seat, and particularly in the recessed areas of the woman’s robe—further invites the viewer to respond to the picture as to an extension of his own space, and to imagine the woman (nearly life-size, as was common in these pictures) as his for the grasping. This is a particularly fine example of the work Leng Mei produced outside the court during the Yongzheng era, and as such is another monument in our hypothetical northern school of figure painting. The most striking and titillating of the illusionistic spaces in the picture is, of course, the multifold-patterned hollow that the artist creates between the woman’s parted legs, into which is thrust the rolled book. The painting suggests to the male viewer the possibility of penetrating both the woman depicted and, as in the Yu Zhiding and Jiao Bingzhen pictures, the space of the picture itself through a visual probing. The believable space that opens around the woman allows us not just to see her but to apprehend her, surround her, embrace her visually, an effect strongly enhanced when the figure is itself represented volumetrically. Using the new foreign techniques for rendering space in these pictures, the artist could at last give the viewer the vicarious experience that Chinese love poems had given their readers for centuries. Paul Rouzer writes of one of the “palace poems,” a genre that had flourished in the sixth century, that it “offers the quintessential rhetorical movement of these poems: penetration. The reader’s eyes move through windows, behind screens, into bedrooms. . . . The forms of women’s arms and legs are noticed through their silk robes; skirts are blown open by the breeze.”53 Visual penetration of the feminized and eroticized space becomes not just a metaphor but an affective analogue for sexual union. Nonetheless, the indicators the artist encoded in the picture, both in the image of the woman and apart from her, constitute the main erotic content. Again to quote Paul Rouzer: “The Chinese palace tradition . . . is interested in the erotic gesture and the process of stimulation itself—arousal is more important than possession.”

Hot Paintings

Meiren paintings in this category, as I have defined it, present the woman absorbed in erotic reveries or dreams, or partially disrobed and exposed. Some of them shade smoothly into the open eroticism of the album paintings. In Chinese fiction the characters frequently dream, and when artists illustrating these stories are called on to depict the dreams, they use the device of enclosing images in balloons emerging from the heads of the sleepers. In erotic album leaves the sleeper might be dreaming of a sexual encounter with his love, and the copulating couple appear in the balloon. In meiren paintings proper, made as scrolls for hanging, the erotic character of the dream must be indicated by subtler means. The ever-resourceful Gu Jianlong once more offers a solution, in a painting known now

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5.21 Gu Jianlong, Beauty in Erotic Reverie. From Zhongguo minghua ji (Shanghai: You Zheng Book Co., 1923), vol. 32.

5.22 Anonymous (eighteenth century; spurious signature of Leng Mei), Woman Fantasizing, Seen through a Window. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 114 x 65 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of James W. and Marilynn Alsdorf Collection, 1966.479. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

only in an old reproduction (figure 5.22). A girl is seen through a moon window, leaning on a table with her head resting on her arm, having just laid down a book she was reading to follow into a daydream the thoughts it aroused. What kind of thoughts they are is suggested by her disordered clothing, by her clasping the table leg between her knees, and by the position of her free hand. To hold the hand in this way is not necessarily an erotic gesture—in dance it is known as the lotus hand, and in other settings it is simply a graceful way to arrange the fingers. But as it appears in this and other meiren and erotic paintings (e.g., the Hua Xuan Eight Beau­ ties, figures 2.1 and 5.2), it must be read in context: she is imagining grasping something. What is being grasped can be inferred from the rolled book nearby, which functions like the one in Leng Mei’s painting (figure 5.21), or by reference to a leaf in one of the erotic albums in which the woman, her hand drawn in this position, is grasping the man’s penis.54 The spaces beneath the table, beyond the girl, and opening back through a doorway partly visible at right allow the viewer’s gaze to move around her and enfold her. Another voyeuristic view through a moon window bears a patently false Leng Mei signature—whether it is a loose copy after a work by Leng Mei or simply the work of a lesser master appropriating his famous name is unclear (figure 5.22). It does not invite the viewer inside, as do the works represented by Leng Mei’s 1724 picture (figure 5.20), but positions him outdoors, leaving her unaware of being observed. (It was catalogued originally in the museum collection as Portrait of a Court Lady—did nobody look at these pictures?) Paintings of this type are a staple in the less subtle erotic albums, where a male voyeur may be included in the picture, gazing through the window (as we do in this one) to watch the woman masturbating. Here the portrayal of the woman stops just short of that; she appears to be contemplating masturbation, with her eyes directed downward, one hand touching her chin in a gesture of thoughtfulness, her lower garments open, her legs parted, her right foot pulled close to her groin (the phallic function of bound feet has often been noted).55 We, too, are stopped just short of viewing her sex through the transparent skirt—a sight that would not, in any case, enhance by much the erotic charge, which is otherwise generated. Annette Kuhn writes about an image of this kind as “the Peeping Tom’s favorite fantasy,” looking at a woman when she does not know he is there. Her example is a photograph in which, she writes, “The woman . . . appears to have been caught by the camera in a moment of autoeroticism. She is enjoying her own body . . . her own touch, her image in a mirror, some erotic fantasy. Alone, she is transported by her pleasure.” And she adds that the voyeur’s fascination arises partly from his feeling that “he might even find out what women are really like, what their pleasure really is.”56 Another painting kept in the same collection—acquired as a gift and hitherto unpublished and unexhibited, shown to me with some hesitation (can his interest in beautiful-woman paintings descend to so crude an example as this?)—depicts a woman about to bathe (figure 5.23).57 She too appears contemplative, although her posture, attire, and setting offer fewer clues to what her thoughts might be. Or per-

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haps it is simply that we do not have other bathing scenes for comparison, aside from a few album leaves (cf. figure 5.26) and a single closely related example. 58 The shallow tub with a board across it at lower right is familiar to anyone who has stayed in traditional Chinese accommodations and had to make do with it for bathing; it leaves one wondering why a civilization otherwise so rich in self-indulgences never devised (other than in hot springs, bathhouses, and palaces) anything like the Japanese o’furo for luxurious soaking. A translucent robe, tied at the top, only partly covers the woman’s body. She sits with her wrists crossed, an ambiguous gesture that may suggest modesty in the presence of someone watching her. Her hair ornament and long fingernails reveal her upper-class status; the flowers in her hair suggest that she is preparing for a visit from her lover. The furnishings at left—a rack for hanging clothes and towels, a covered mirror, a tripodal incense burner, a stack of books, a jar with leaves resting

5.23 Anonymous (eighteenth century), Beauty about to Bathe. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 160.6 x 86.9 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Florence Ayscough and Harley Farnsworth MacNair, 1943.151. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

on some kind of wooden rack—fill out the scene, and give it value as an illustration for some future study of bathing practices in China. The Female Nude in Chinese Painting

We had best confront the question of why the Beauty about to Bathe painting initially looks crude and low-class. In part it is because damage and clumsy remounting have left it streaked and uneven in tone, but that does not wholly account for the bad impression it makes on present-day viewers. Another reason, probably the central one, is that the woman’s body looks so square and ill-proportioned to our eyes, with its hanging breasts and oddly drawn legs, seeming to substantiate the common belief that Chinese artists were incompetent in painting the female nude on the relatively rare occasions when they attempted it at all. One prominent sinologue, Derk Bodde, enumerating the failings of Chinese erotic pictures, includes among them “anatomical clumsiness.”59 Another, Mark Elvin, writes, “Chinese pictures of the human body, clothed or semi-clothed (in a furtive pornography), are—to Western eyes—meager, schematic, and inadequate.”60 Robert van Gulik describes the nudes depicted by Chinese book illustrators as “clumsily rendered, most of them having a disproportionately large upper body,” and offers the unconvincing explanation that this is because they “are not based on actual observation”; instead, the artists “took the t’i-pen [tiben, sketch models] for human figures draped in clothes and tried to construct a nude body within this outline.”61 (So dissatisfied was van Gulik with Chinese depictions of the nude female that he felt obliged to fabricate spurious “late Ming” erotic prints with nude women as “Chinese models” for the many who appear in his illustrations for his Judge Dee novels, claimed to be in old Chinese style.) 62 The idea that the Chinese artists who drew these figures, many of whom lived in the pleasure quarters of the cities, were unfamiliar with the unclothed female body seems highly improbable. Even less likely is it that as a group the urban studio painters, so exquisitely in control of their imagery in nearly all other elements of their pictures, would consistently prove clumsy in this one. In fact, the drawing of the upper part of the body of the woman preparing to bathe exhibits refinements like those we come to expect in other meiren paintings: the line of the neck and shoulder, the tuft of hair hanging down at the side, the drawing of the eyes and nose and (especially) the mouth, all seem so subtle and deliberate as to indicate strongly that the artist meant to depict the rest of her body and its proportions just as they are. Moreover, when this image is brought together with others—pictures of Yang Guifei bathing, erotic album leaves, the rare meiren painting that reveals so much of the female form—depictions of the unclothed woman not only prove fairly numerous, but exhibit a striking consistency. All this strongly suggests that although the female nude was never a separate genre in China, as it was in European painting, a Chinese ideal of female corporeal beauty and sexiness did exist, and we had best use the pictures to understand it instead of simply deriding them. Even so intelligent a study as John Hay’s goes wrong when it comes to the question of Chinese representations of the nude body, a question that Hay is able to dismiss by claiming that examples are too

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rare and too artistically insignificant to merit consideration.63 By remaining mostly on a theoretical plane and representing them only by a single Jin Ping Mei woodblock illustration showing a sexual coupling in the middle distance, Hay is able to argue that “bodies were not represented in [Chinese] art because they did not exist in the culture.” The fault lies less in Hay’s method and intent than in the near-inaccessibility to him (and others) of the pictures that would have permitted a better-informed account. Once more we see the consequences of the systematic exclusion and misunderstanding of these pictures, exactly the situation I want this book to correct. Another clue to the probable existence within Chinese painting of a separate and popular genre of pictures featuring nude and seminude women can be seen in a work that is probably a close copy after a painting by Cui Hui, Passing the Summer by a Lotus Pond (figure 5.24). The composition seems too elaborate and sophisticated to have been fabricated by a forger, but the drawing is stiff, lacking the fluency of Cui Hui’s brush. The work is of value nevertheless as a provocative indicator of an all-but-lost subgenre, the erotic female image in an architectural and landscape setting. Copied also in the upper left are an inscription by the presumed original artist, Cui Hui, a poem with his signature and a date corresponding to 1721, and another inscription by the later figure artist Yu Ji (1738–1823), consisting of another poem with the addition of basic information about Cui Hui. Both poems extol the charms of the woman’s body in time-honored metaphors. She reclines in a bamboo lounge chair, escaping the summer heat on a veranda overlooking a lotus pond, wearing only a translucent skirt draped loosely over her waist. Her legs are parted, and she fans between them; her other hand touches her cheek as she gazes out at the viewer, seemingly aware of being the object of his gaze and returning it unabashedly. The provocative ambiguity set up here, with the woman appearing aloof but nonetheless somehow available, is a favorite stratagem in meiren paintings. An open book and scholarly paraphernalia are on the table behind her, and beyond that a stand of display shelving with antiques and scrolls; we are looking at the inner recesses of an affluent residence, and she is a guixiu or cultivated gentlewoman. One can only imagine the further refinements that the original painting must have offered and hope that that original, along with others of the type, may come to light when now-restricted parts of Chinese collections are opened up. No Chinese source known to me mentions the hanging of strongly erotic paintings in bedrooms or other rooms of the house, but a mid-nineteenthcentury English visitor to China, Henry Charles Sirr—after describing the practice of hanging scrolls of calligraphy with Confucian maxims—continues, “In strange contradistinction to these precepts, the most obscene, immodest, and filthy paintings, representing every description of vice and indecency, too frequently are seen suspended in the same apartment, almost side by side with the maxims of the sages.” A female companion reports to him seeing similar hangings in the women’s quarters.64 We can hope that more evidence will come to light, ideally in Chinese sources, that will confirm or alter this account, perhaps providing clues to how widespread these practices were and how far back in time they can be traced.

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5.24 After Cui Hui (active ca. 1720s–40s or after), Passing the Summer by a Lotus Pond. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 121.5 x 41.3 cm. Collection of Ferdinand M. Bertholet, Amsterdam.

To conclude this chapter I examine two more paintings that prominently feature female nudes or women clad only in see-through garments; they were chosen from quite a number that would have served. One is Emperor Xuanzong Spies on Yang Guifei Bathing, attributable by style to Gu Jianlong (figure 5.25, a detail of figure 1.4). The other is a leaf in an erotic album, also by Gu (figure 5.26). With these paintings we can begin to recognize the attributes of the female nude that Chinese artists and their audiences preferred. She bears little resemblance to the classical European ideal or to any of our more recent Western ones. The upper part of her body is indeed large, her head an oval, her shoulders usually broad, as Yang Guifei’s would be if they were not turned sideward; alternatively, as in the album leaf, her shoulders slope. Her torso tends to the rectangular, and her chest is flat and small-breasted (the woman in the anonymous bathing scene, figure 5.23, is unusually bosomy). Her arms and legs are fairly short—no long-limbed beauties appear in old Chinese pictures, at least those in which the limbs are exposed— and taper toward hands and feet, which are drawn quite small. Nothing approaching Western-style voluptuousness is attempted; a Rubensesque fleshiness in breasts and buttocks would presumably have been unattractive to late-period Chinese male consumers of these pictures, although corpulence had been admired in Tang women. The type varies in works of different artists, schools, and periods, but this is the basic model, which appears to have been pervasive in the early Qing period. The split-bamboo screen through which we view Yang Guifei performs the same concealing-revealing function as the gauzy robe on the woman about to bathe (figure 5.23); as with similarly translucent robes, curtains, and screens in many other pictures intended to arouse, the ostensible attempt to hide heightens the viewer’s forbidden pleasure in seeing through. Yang Guifei turns her face to look out at us, her slight smile making us complicit in her exposure, putting us into the position of her imperial lover and thereby neutralizing, for voyeuristic purposes, his own image at upper right. A reddish tinge along the contours of her bare flesh gives a slight corporeality to the figure. It is worth noting that illusionistic, volumetric shading, even after it became available to Chinese artists, was usually used only lightly on the exposed parts of human bodies; it could be applied much more strongly to robes, furniture, and other objects. In the leaf from the Gu Jianlong album (figure 5.26) the young man and woman are dallying in the bath before repairing to the bed seen farther back for serious sex. They are clearly enjoying the sight of each other’s nude bodies. In this they follow their counterparts in Chinese fiction, where descriptions of sexual encounters often make a point of the light being left on. The hero of Li Yu’s Rou Pu Tuan (Carnal Prayer Mat) advises his new wife that sex is “ten times more enjoyable in the daytime,” because it is “precisely when we’re looking at each other that we really get excited.”65 This and many other passages from Chinese pictures and writings reveal the absurdity of the claim that the Chinese were simply not interested in, attracted by, or sexually stimulated by the female nude.

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5.25 Probably Gu Jianlong or a close follower, Emperor Xuanzong Spies on Yang Guifei Bathing. Detail of figure 1.4. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk. Yurinkan Museum, Kyoto.

5.26 Gu Jianlong (seals of the artist), Couple in the Bath. Leaf from a twelve-leaf erotic album, ink and colors on paper. Collection of the late C. C. Wang, New York.

The exposure of the woman’s sex, which the young man is playfully stimulating with a wet washrag draped over his big toe, permits us to see that she has no pubic hair. Nude women in Chinese erotic paintings ordinarily do not—and when they do, it is indicated only faintly. This is in extreme contrast to Japanese erotic paintings and ukiyo’e prints, in which pubic hair on both males and females is copious and prominent. (It is the part until recently blacked out in the censoring of erotic films and photographs, a practice that attests to its centrality in Japanese sexual iconography.) Just the opposite appears to have been true in China. Keith McMahon cites a story in which a man, admiring his wife’s “perfect” body, “gleaming white and without the slightest blemish,” notes that she “has no pubic hair, a detail he had noticed when he first spied on her bathing”—and, McMahon notes, “one that features in other Chinese erotica as well.”66 Absence or sparseness of pubic hair figured in Chinese concepts of feminine beauty; in paintings it sometimes, but by no means always, indicates that the woman is young. A great many other representations of the nude or seminude woman in Chinese painting doubtless exist in public and private collections, whose curators and owners may be reluctant to show them in the mistaken belief that they are an embarrassment, of only prurient interest. I hope that this study will embolden such owners to bring forth these pictures and to show high-quality examples with pride. Afterword

The genre of meiren hua as it has been traced here seems to lose its momentum in the late eighteenth century and is scarcely practiced after that—its principal heritage may be in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Shanghai color-lithograph posters and advertisements that have recently been studied and published as early signs of modernism in China. The depictions of beautiful women I deal with in this chapter gave way to the creation of very different meiren paintings, those that any cultivated Chinese collector typically brings out to show if someone comes asking to see beautiful-woman pictures. These are the works by early nineteenthcentury masters who specialized in this genre: Gai Qi, Fei Danxu, Gu Luo, Tang Luming, and others. The genre of beautiful-woman pictures could become a “polite art,” suitable for respectable collectors to own and enjoy publicly, only by relinquishing nearly all its evocative power and erotic content and becoming relatively genteel and conventionalized. Then, and not before, practitioners of meiren hua could be hailed as important and singular masters who “invented” the type. But in fact the paintings of one of these artists are all but indistinguishable from those of another.67 Their achievement might be seen as collectively creating an orthodox meiren hua corresponding to Orthodox landscape. Illusionistic effects of all kinds are eschewed, and most of what made the genre interesting is lost. Too often, the women have vacuous faces and insipid forms; they simper and languish, and their robes seem virtually uninhabited. These are certainly not pictures that extol the women, except perhaps for their pliability and conventional prettiness. The paintings may be aesthetically rewarding, and their thematic differentiations make up a

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rich repertory that is worthy of study. But the age when beautiful-woman paintings served both as pictorial manifestations of a flourishing courtesan culture and as celebrations of women of accomplishment, and were idolized like real women by those who owned them and gazed at them, seems to have come to an end. The same appears to be true of most other popular and functional painting of the kind this book presents: although individual artists such as Ren Xiong (1823–57) and Ren Yi (Ren Bonian, 1840–96) could still produce occasional, symbolic, and decorative pictures of a high order, no large-scale continuation of these genres as inventive and fine as what I have introduced here can be traced past the end of the Qianlong era, the late eighteenth century. The striking falling-off in technique and originality in Imperial Academy painting after that time is symptomatic: the court could no longer draw from the cities those artists with high-level skills in academic styles who might have sustained it.68 Reading the biographies of mid-nineteenthcentury masters such as Ren Xiong suggests a reason: the political and social turmoil of that age, the almost constant warfare in the regions where these artists had worked, disrupted the stability that such a studio system assumed. The Shanghai School masters of the later nineteenth century, the guohua or “traditional” painters of the twentieth century, are in their ways worthy successors, but their styles and intentions are very different, and they scarcely attempt the relatively realistic, technically finished kind of painting that had ruled within the professional tradition from the Song period on. That kind of painting had enjoyed its last flowering in the “pictures for use and pleasure” made by urban studio artists, southern and northern, of the High Qing.

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b e a u t i f u l w o m e n

Conclusion I am fully aware that this book has taken on a sprawling and somewhat episodic character over the more than ten years I have worked on it. My late efforts to tighten it, made sincerely and under the good advice of several editors and reviewers, have too often given way to considerations that worked against unity and order: my strong feelings about what I want the book to accomplish, what points I want to make persuasively, what side issues have opened as I worked that seemed irresistibly worth pursuing. If my writing seems replete with loose ends, that is in some part intentional: I want the book to point the way toward further, deeper, and altogether better studies of materials and topics only briefly introduced here. Specialists in women’s studies can carry out more trenchant analyses of the pictures of women, from feminist or other perspectives; social historians can clarify further the social uses of certain kinds of paintings; patient browsers of old collections and auction catalogs can augment greatly the known store of vernacular paintings and their artists. The sheer task of locating, identifying, and in many cases reattributing all the paintings I have dealt with here, organizing them loosely into subject categories, and offering provisional interpretations has been enough of a challenge. A special pleasure in working on this book has been the opportunities some of the paintings have afforded me to undertake, to the best of my ability, detailed and

expansive readings of them. Literati painting, with its far more limited range of subjects and its dedication to brushwork and echoes of old styles, demanded a close attention to those more formal aspects of the work while tending to discourage, as of small interest, any extended treatment of it as a representation, a picture. The field of Chinese painting studies has accordingly been populated in significant part by scholars who are more comfortable with reading texts than with reading pictures. Literati painting—and “high-quality,” name-artist painting more broadly— by being relatively well documented lends itself to such nonvisual treatments, which can in their own way be illuminating and welcome, indeed necessary for the full development of our studies. But they can only founder if brought to bear on vernacular painting, which is accompanied by scant textual exegesis, if any. For reasons dealt with at several points in this book, these paintings seldom bore lengthy inscriptions, by either the artist or others, since written texts would draw the viewer’s eye to the surface and impede the “real-world” readings the pictures encourage. And their low-class, “disposable” character, their failure to offer intricate stylistic and topical allusions that required decoding, discouraged critics and essayists from writing about them. Ideally, of course, any serious study should aim at least at making effective use of materials both written and pictorial. That need for balance, it should be added, is as incumbent on non–art historians as on art historians: just as they (quite reasonably) expect us to master languages and other skills for reading texts, they must themselves master the skills of reading paintings if their uses of them are to be truly penetrating and illuminating.1 My pleasure in imagining the new studies and scholarly uses of vernacular Chinese paintings to which this book will help open the way is accompanied, then, by a conviction: that while those studies will surely uncover new textual sources for information about the pictures and their social contexts, the contributions that go deepest will continue to be based heavily, as this book has been, on careful and prolonged visual immersion in the paintings themselves. But two large obstacles threaten to block the healthy development of this new area of research. The first is that studies of this kind demand not only a grounding in Chinese cultural history and in the languages needed for effective research, but also, and even more important for the reasons suggested above, a cultivated eye, trained in the art-historical practice of looking. I mean by that not only the refinements of visual judgment required for making stylistic distinctions, what is often today dismissed as old-fashioned connoisseurship, but even the coarser kinds of visual differentiation. And I know too well, from experiences not only with students but also with colleagues of secure reputations and standing, that today even a prestigious academic degree in art history does not guarantee visual acuity. (As one illustrative instance, I recall a lecture on late-period Chinese ancestor portraits by a wellestablished specialist who proved incapable of recognizing, even after the signs were pointed out to him by audience members trained in looking, that several of the portraits he was showing and discussing were clearly copies of photographs.) Too

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o­ ften, an ability to maneuver through abstruse theoretical positions, along with language skills, is taken as a training that trumps the kind aimed at preparing the student for dealing with the visual properties of the object. In China, where Westernstyle art history is still a new and suspect discipline, the avoidance of a visual approach has even become, for some specialists and in some academic programs, a matter of doctrine: visual studies represent for them an unwelcome foreign intrusion into the time-honored Chinese tradition of giving priority to the written word.2 The other major obstacle is the sheer difficulty of locating usable images of the paintings. Throughout this book I have provided, in notes to discussions of particular painting subjects and types, numerous references to related works that may be found in auction catalogs and old publications. But in the end, how many of those who might want to follow up these references have access to large runs of old auction catalogs, or research libraries of old reproduction books? The ultimate solution to that problem, in today’s world, would appear to be the creation of large image databases, accessible online. I hope to engage in a project of that kind in future, and encourage it in any others who have, like myself, spent many years assembling masses of uncommon visual materials in the now-outmoded media of slides and photographs. Some reasons why traditional Chinese writers on painting chose not to include the vernacular kinds within their areas of concern were suggested early in this book. It was certainly not because of any lack of interpretative issues to write about; the vernacular kinds of painting, like others, were set against a rich background of popular understanding on which they depended for their social functioning. The artists who made the pictures, that is, and their audiences who acquired and used them, shared a wealth of knowledge that suited the paintings and their imagery to the occasions and situations that motivated their production. But this knowledge—a visual literacy that must have permeated at least the upper economic levels of Chinese society—was not of the sort that was written down and preserved. While our understanding of Chinese social history will continue to be derived principally from textual sources, paintings of the types introduced here open the way to other, image-based kinds of understanding, which can amplify and deepen what is learnable from writings. In this new situation, the task of the art historian is twofold. On the one hand, it is to make the pictorial materials, ridden as they are with misattributions, mis­ datings, and subject misidentifications, securely accessible insofar as possible not only to general readers and art lovers but also to specialist colleagues, through firm attributions and placement in correct historical contexts. On the other, it is to provide interpretations of a kind for which the art historian is best equipped, through disciplinary training and broad experience with related works. Our readings—along with those made by colleagues in other disciplines, especially those who are willing to use the pictures not merely as illustrations but as unique sources of information— will add a visual dimension to our understanding of the manifold and changing concerns and textures of Chinese life, opening avenues of investigation that are inac­ cessible to readers of texts alone.

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conclusion

Finally, we can be grateful to the artists who made these paintings for having given expression in their works to the nuanced sensibilities they developed through their close engagement, as painters and as people, with human affairs and feelings— an engagement that had the unfortunate side effect of branding their pursuits as trivial and marginalizing them within the received history of Chinese painting. We can be thankful also for the happy, if often fortuitous, circumstances that have preserved a substantial body of their output against the forces that worked toward its loss. Aspects of High Qing life and culture about which the written record is mute reveal themselves to us through these pictures.

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appendix Poem by Zhou Qi The poem is inscribed on Wang Qiao’s A Woman at Her Dressing Table (fig. 1.6). The ­translation is by Ellen Widmer, from Widmer’s The Beauty and the Book, pp. 298–99.

How many lives did it take you to become a person in a picture? Willow are dark, but flowers are bright, they stand out from the dusty world. The fragrant wind from the twenty-four bridges cannot reach her [she is untainted by sensual associations of the courtesan quarters]; With one scroll of Daoist text she passes her youthful years [she longs for spiritual transcendence despite her circumstances]. Red peaches and green willows by the lakes and mountains, One stretch of balustrade with six bends. It must be for love of flowers that she rises early, Enshrouded in wind and dew [difficult circumstances, as well as morning weather], she arranges her hair. The spring wind is gentler than silken willow branches, The orioles and swallows are silent, and the small courtyard is quiet. Do not be surprised that the servant arrives noiselessly, The toilette case and the incense box have not yet been packed away. This spring the weather is unpredictably sunny and cloudy. She fears the wind blowing but loves the coming of the moon [a polite way of saying that she was up late with a lover or client]. For one vase of flowers the curtain is half rolled up [like the courtesan, who half reveals, half conceals]. [The weather] being by turns cold and hot, I worry about her.

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In all naturalness, the shadows of clouds frame the morning glow [a poetic way of saying that her hair, half in disarray, frames her beautiful blushing face], Do not mistake her face for the flower by the wayside. One deep gaze from her eyes, one scroll of books, Why care about spring spreading to the ends of the earth [the courtesan is bookish, above sensual experience]. On the gauze windows, the sun’s shadows rise slowly. This morning’s spring chill—you knew about it last night. Choose your clothes carefully—they have to fit your person. Your morning toilette is no different [i.e., demands as much care] from the evening one.

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glossary



academic



arhats



baimiao

As used in writings about Chinese painting, refers to the polished, detailed style used in the Imperial Academy of Painting, especially during the Song Dynasty. Disciples of the Buddha; Buddhist holy men. “Plain drawing,” painting in ink lines, without washes or color.

caizi jiaren “Scholar and beauty,” a type of fiction.



chen



chungong hua



dali shi

“Yunnan stones,” slabs of marble with natural designs from impurities, often resembling peaks and clouds, that are set decoratively in furniture.



Eccentric Masters

A designation applied to eight artists active in the city of Yangzhou in the early and mideighteenth century who worked in unorthodox styles and sometimes depicted strange subjects (sources differ on the artists included in the list).



fenben

Sketch-copies, or preliminary sketches, made by artists and sometimes preserved for ­f uture use.



fu¯ zoku’ga

Genre painting (Japanese)—paintings of daily life, cityscapes, low-life and popular-­ culture subjects.



gonghui



guixiu

“Your subject,” a character written before their signatures by artists painting for the emperor. “Spring palace pictures,” overtly erotic paintings.

“Respectfully painted,” a phrase added to the signature on paintings done for high-level, but not imperial, patrons. Gentlewoman, woman of a gentry family.

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gushi

“Old matters,” historical episodes used for paintings intended to carry political and other messages.



handscroll

A scroll unrolled horizontally and viewed from right to left, with the right hand rolling up the part viewed.



huashi



hybrid style

A painting style in which elements taken from a foreign (European) pictorial tradition are conspicuously mixed with elements of native origin.



Imperial Painting Academy

A term used loosely in English-language writings to designate the bodies of artists ­employed within the court to produce paintings as desired by the emperor and others. It took on quite different organizational forms over the centuries.



ji



Jiangnan



jiaqing tu



jiehua



literati painting



machi-eshi



Magu



meiren hua



mogu



nianhua

“Painting master,” an artisan painter as distinguished from a literati painter.

“Singing girl,” a cultivated prostitute, courtesan. “South of the River,” the Yangtze delta region. “Family auspicious pictures,” pictures made for hanging on holidays and family occasions. “Ruled-line,” painstaking rendering of architectural subjects. Painting by scholar-amateurs, men educated in the classics for the civil service who, at least in principle, painted as an avocation. “Urban picture-makers,” low-class artists (Japanese). A popular goddess or fairy, paintings of whom were hung at birthday celebrations for women and on other occasions. Beautiful-woman painting. “Copying the antique,” copying old paintings. “New Year’s pictures,” popular prints, some of which were indeed made for New Year’s purchase, but including also popular prints of other kinds.



Northern School

See Southern School, Northern School.



Orthodox school

A school of landscape painting that flourished from the late Ming into the early Qing and, much weakened, beyond; dominated by Wang Shimin and others of the Four Wangs, it turned the stylistic tradition of Dong Qichang into a learnable, less-original method of painting.



qing



san xing



shi’hua



shinu hua



Shoulao Xing



Southern School, Northern School



Suzhou pian

Desire, feeling. “Three stars,” a painting subject combining three popular gods, hung on the occasion of a birthday. “Occasional paintings,” paintings made for hanging on particular occasions. “Paintings of gentlewomen,” a term used by Chinese writers indiscriminately for paintings of female subjects. The god of old age, pictures of whom were hung at celebrations of advanced-age birthdays. Two large traditions or “schools” of painting, especially landscape, discerned (or invented) by Dong Qichang. They are discussed in chapter 1, in the section titled “The Neglected North.” To be distinguished from the truly geographical northern school of figure painting discussed in chapters 2 and 3. “Suzhou pieces,” paintings produced commercially and somewhat repetitively in Suzhou in the late Ming and after.

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taihu-shi



toushi hua



urban studio masters



vernacular



weiping



xianfa hua



xingle tu



xingsi



Zhe school

“Rocks from [Lake] Tai,” heavily eroded, bizarrely shaped rocks brought from the shores of Lake Tai to be set up in gardens. “Looking-through pictures,” pictures using Western-style perspective. See also xianfa hua. Professionally trained artists who worked in the cities producing, on commission, paintings desired for particular uses and occasions, executed in the “academic” manner. Reflecting popular taste and practice, made for everyday use, non-elite. “Surrounding screen,” placed around the throne or couch of the emperor. “Linear-method pictures,” pictures using Western-style perspective. See also toushi hua. “Picture of enjoying pleasure,” a portrait in which the sitter is surrounded by things he enjoys. “Form-likeness,” a term normally used pejoratively as a quality to be pursued only in low-class paintings. A school or movement in painting—named after the province of Zhejiang where it was centered and flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—that specialized in landscapes with figures; it derived its styles principally from Song Academy painting.

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g lo ssary

list of chinese names and terms

Anhui  安徽 Bada Shanren  八大山人 baimiao  白描 Baochai  寶釵 Baoyu  寶玉 Beijing  北京 Bi Ruan  畢沅 Bimei tu  皕美圖 bitong  嬖童

Chen Huan  陳桓 Chen Mei  陳枚 Chen Tong  陳桐 Cheng Liang  程梁 Chengguan Ge  澄觀閣 Chongzhen  崇禎 Chungong hua  春宮畫 Cui Hui  崔徽 Cui Yingying  崔鶯鶯 Cui Zizhong  崔子忠

caizi jiaren  才子佳人 Cao Xiuxian  曹秀先 Cao Xueqin  曹雪芹 Chang Yin  長蔭 Changchun Yuan  長春園 Chang’e  嫦娥 Changshu  常熟 changxia  長夏 Chanzhen yishi  禪真逸史 chatu  插圖 chen 臣 Chen Hongshou  陳洪綬

Dali  達禮 dali shi  大理石 Dangtu  當塗 Dantu  丹徒 Daocun  道存 Deng Chun  鄧椿 Ding Gao  丁皋 Dong Qichang  董其昌 Dong Xiaowan  董小宛 Dongxuanzi  洞玄子 Dou Zhen  竇鎮 Du Jin  杜堇

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Duanwu  端午 Duanyang  端陽 Duya  都衙 Fan Qi  樊圻 Fan Xueyi  范雪儀 Fei Danxu  費丹旭 Feiyan  飛燕 fenben  粉本 Feng, Lady  婕妤 Feng Menglong  馮夢龍 Fengliu Juechang  風流絕暢 fu (happiness) 福 fu (rhymeprose) 賦 Fu Derong  傅德容 Fujian  福建 fu¯ zoku’ga (feng suhua)  風俗畫 Gai Qi  改琦 Gao Cen  高岑 Gao Shiqi  高士奇 Ge Hong  葛洪 Gengzhi tu  耕織中 Gong Xian  龔賢 gonghui  恭繪 goulan  勾欄 Gu Hongzhong  顧閎中 Gu Jianlong  顧見龍 Gu Luo  顧洛 Gu Zuntao  顧尊燾 Guanyin  觀音 guihua  桂花 guixiu  閨秀 Guo Xi  郭熙 Guo Zhongshu  郭忠恕 Guochao Yuanhua Lu  國朝院畫録 guohua  國畫 gushi  故事 Guwangyan  姑妄言 haixi  海西 Han 漢 Han Xizai  韩熙载 Hangzhou  杭州 Hanjiang  邗江 Hedong, Mme.  河東夫人 Heshen  和珅 Hongli  弘曆 Honglou Meng  紅樓夢 Hongniang  紅娘

210 

Hongren  弘仁 Hu Jing  胡敬 Hu Shi  胡適 Hu Yong  胡墉 hua huan  畫幻 hua huaren  畫畫人 Hua Xu  華胥 Hua Xuan  華烜 Hua Yan  華嵒 Huang Binhong  黃賓虹 Huang Gongwang  黃公望 Huang Shen  黃慎 Huang Shih-fu  黃石符 Huang Yingshen  黃應諶 Huangbo (Jap. Obaku)  黃檗 Huangsu Miaolun  黃素妙論 huashi  畫史 Huating  華亭 Huizhou  徽州 Huqiu  虎丘 ji 妓 Ji Kaisheng  季開生 Jia Tanchun  賈探春 Jiading  嘉定 Jiang Tingxi  蔣廷錫 Jiangnan  江南 Jiangsu  江蘇 Jiao Bingzhen  焦秉貞 Jiaqing  嘉慶 jiaqing tu  家慶圖 jiaren  佳人 Jichen  吉臣 jiehua  界畫 Jin Ping Mei  金瓶梅 Jin Tingbiao  金廷標 Jining  濟寧 Jinling  金陵 Jinmen Huashi  金門畫史 Juanqin Zhai  倦勤齋 juren  舉人 kang 匟 Kang Tao  康濤 Kangxi  康熙 Kuncan  髡殘 Kuo Li-ch’eng  郭立誠 Lan Ying  藍瑛 Lang Shining  郎世寧

lao 勞 Leng Jian  冷鑑 Leng Mei  冷枚 Leng Quan  冷銓 Li Dou  李斗 Li Ping’er  李瓶兒 Li Qingzhao  李清照 Li Rihua  李日華 Li Shan  李鱓 Li Shida  李士達 Li Yin  李寅 Li Yu  李漁 Li Yufen  李玉棻 liangzhi  良知 Liaoning  遼寧 Liaoyang  遼陽 Liaozhai zhiyi  聊齋誌異 Lin Daiyu  林黛玉 lingzhi  靈芝 Liu Hualiang  劉驊良 Liu Rushi  柳如是 Liu Xiang  劉向 Liu Yin  柳蔭 Longmen  龍門 lu 祿 Lu Ming  鹿鳴 Lu Xun  魯迅 Lu Wei  陸日為 Lü Dongbin  呂洞賓 Luo Ping  羅聘 Luofu  羅浮

Ni Zan  倪瓚 nianhua  年畫 Nie Chongzheng  聶崇正 Niu Shu  鈕樞 nong jia gushi  農家故事 Pang Yuanji  龐元濟 Pei Jingfu  裴景福 Peiwenzhai shuhua pu  佩文齋書畫譜

Penglai  蓬萊 penzai  盆栽 pipa  琵琶 Pipa Xing  琵琶行 Pu Songling  蒲松齡 Puji Qiao  普濟橋 Putian  莆田 qi 氣 Qian Hui’an  錢慧安 Qian Qianyi  錢謙益 Qianlong  乾隆 Qianshantang shuhua ji  鈐山堂書畫記

qin 琴 Qin-Huai  秦淮 Qin nü  秦女 qing (emotion) 情 Qing (dynasty) 清 Qing Gong Zhencang Bimei Tu  清宫珍藏皕美圖

Qingchao Shuhuajia Bilu  Ma Hezhi  馬和之 Ma Shouzhen  馬守貞 Ma Xiangshun  馬相舜 Magu  麻姑 Mao Xiang  冒襄 meiping  梅瓶 meiren  美人 Mi Fu  米芾 Ming 明 minjian huagong  民間畫工 mogu fenben  摹古粉本 mo-xiong  抹胸 Mu, Duke  穆公 Mudan Ting  牡丹亭 Naishi xingle  乃時行樂 nanjiang  南匠 Nanjing  南京

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l i st o f ch i n e s e n am e s a n d t e rms

清朝书画家筆錄

Qingming Shanghe Tu  清明上河圖 Qingshi  情史 Qiu Shi  仇氏 Qiu Ying  仇英 Qiu Zhu  仇珠 Quanqing tu  全慶圖 Quanzhou  泉州 Que Lan  闕嵐 Ren Bonian  任伯年 Ren Xiong  任熊 Ren Yi  任頤 Rongqi  蓉溪 Roupu tuan  肉蒲團 ruyi  如意 Ruyi Guan  如意館 Ruyijun zhuan  如意君傳

san xing  三星 Sanhan  三韓 Sha Family  沙氏 Shan Guoqiang  单国强 Shandong  山東 Shanhuwang Hualu  珊瑚網畫録 Shang Rui  上睿 Shantang  山塘 Shanyin  山陰 Shaoxing  紹興 Shen Cang  沈蒼 Shen Nanpin  沈南蘋 Shen Quan  沈銓 Shen Shigeng  沈士鯁 Shen Zhou  沈周 Shenliu Dushu Tang  深柳讀書堂 Shi jing  詩經 Shi Pangzi  施胖子 shi’hua  時畫 shinu hua  仕女畫 Shitao  石濤 Shizhuang  石莊 Shoulao Xing  壽老星 Shouxian  壽仙 Shunzhi  順治 si 私 Si wu xie  思無邪 Song 宋 Song jiang  松江 Su Dingyuan  蘇定遠 Su Dongpo  蘇東坡 Su E Pian  素娥篇 Su Hui  蘇蕙 Su Shi  蘇軾 Su Wu  蘇武 Su Xiaoxiao  蘇小小 Sui Yangdi  隋煬帝 Sunü miaolun  素女妙論 Suzhou  蘇州 Suzhou pian  蘇州片 Taicang  太倉 taihu-shi  太湖石 Tang Dai  唐岱 Tang Luming  湯祿名 Tang Yin  唐寅 tay u¯   大夫 Tianjin  天津 Tianshui Bingshan Lu  天水冰山錄 Tiantai  天臺

212 

tiben  體本 Tongsu Bian  通俗編 toushi hua  透視畫 Wang Chengpei  汪承霈 Wang Donggao  王東皋 Wang Hui  王翬 Wang Ji  王積 Wang Jian  王鑑 Wang Keyu  汪珂玉 Wang Qiao  汪喬 Wang Shan  王掞 Wang Sheng  王聲 Wang Shi  王式 Wang Shimin  王時敏 Wang Shizhen  王士禎 Wang Yuanqi  王原祁 Wang Yuanxun  王元勳 Wang Yün  王雲 Wanli  萬曆 Wanshou tu  萬壽圖 weiping  圍屏 weiqi  圍棋 Wen Jia  文嘉 Wen Zhengming  文徵明 Wen Zhenheng  文震亨 Wu Bin  吳彬 Wu Hong  吳宏 Wu Li  吳歷 Wu Ling  吳令 Wu Zetian  武則天 Wu Zhen  吳鎮 Wu Zhuo  吳焯 Wujiang  吳江 wuming jia  無名家 wutong  梧桐 Wuxi  吳錫 Wuxing  吳興 xianfa hua  線法畫 Xiao Chen  蕭晨 xiaoming jia  小名家 Xiaoshi  萧史 Xie Bin  謝彬 Xie Sui  謝遂 Ximen Qing  西門慶 xingle tu  行樂圖 xingling  性靈 xingsi  形似 Xiongnu  匈奴

Xiuning  休寧 Xiwangmu  西王母 Xixiang ji  西廂記 Xiyou ji  西遊記 Xu Ling  徐陵 Xu Mei  徐玫 Xu Pu  徐溥 Xu Yang  徐揚 Xuancang  玄藏 Xuanzong  玄宗 Yan shi shuhuaji  嵩氏書畫記 Yan Song  嚴嵩 Yan Yi  顏嶧 Yan Zhenqing  顏真卿 Yang Boda  楊伯達 Yang Guifei  楊貴妃 Yang Shen  楊慎 Yangxin Dian  養心殿 Yangzheng tu  養正圖 Yangzhou  揚州 Yangzhou huafang lu  揚州畫舫錄 Yanke tiba  煙客題跋 Yantai  燕臺 Yao Wenhan  姚文瀚 Yao Zai  姚仔 Ye Tao  葉洮 Ye Xin  葉欣 Yin Shi  殷湜 Ying Bojue  應伯爵 yinying fa  陰影法 Yinzhen  胤禎 Yongzheng  雍正 Yu Ji  余集 Yu Zhiding  禹之鼎 Yuan Hongdao  袁宏道 Yuan Jiang  袁江 Yuan Mei  袁枚 Yuan Shangtong  袁尚統 Yuan Yao  袁耀 Yuanming Yüan  圓明園 Yuejun Tu  閱駿圖 Yueman Qingyou  月滿清游 Yun Shouping  惲壽平 Yunreng  允礽 Yutai Xinyong  玉臺新詠

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l i st o f ch i n e s e n am e s a n d t e rms

Zeng Jing  曾鯨 Zengli-hua Yanjiu  贈禮畫研究 Zhai Hao  翟灝 Zhang Chang  張敞 Zhang Chou  張丑 Zhang Dai  張岱 Zhang Geng  張庚 Zhang Hong  張宏 Zhang Jing  張經 Zhang Junrui  張君瑞 Zhang Tingyan  張廷彥 Zhang Weibang  張為邦 Zhang Xuan  張萱 Zhang Xueliang  張學良 Zhang Yin  長蔭 Zhang Zeduan  張擇端 Zhang Zhen  張震 Zhang Zhupo  張竹坡 Zhang Zuolin  張作霖 Zhangwu zhi  長物誌 Zhao Chang  趙昌 Zhao Feiyan  趙飛燕 Zhao Mengfu  趙孟頫 Zhao Wei  趙維 Zhao Zuo  趙左 Zhejiang  浙江 Zheng Banqiao  鄭板橋 Zheng Xie  鄭燮 Zhenjiang  鎮江 Zhibuzu Zhai congshu  知不足齋叢書

zhihou  祗候 Zhong Kui  鍾馗 Zhou Chen  周臣 Zhou Fang  周昉 Zhou Lianggong  周亮工 Zhou Qi  周綺 Zhou Shilin  周石林 Zhou Xun  周珣 Zhu Jiajin  朱家溍 Zhuangtao Ge shuhua lu  莊陶閣書畫錄

Zong Bing  宗炳 Zou Yigui  鄒一桂 Zou Zhe  鄒喆

notes

The following abbreviations are used:

Elegant Brush

Chou, Ju-hsi, and Claudia Brown, eds. The Elegant Brush: Chinese Painting under the Qianlong Emperor, 1735–1795. Exhibition catalog. Phoenix, Ariz.: Phoenix Art Museum, 1985.



HSCS

Yu, Anlan, comp. Huashi congsu [Compilation of Painting Histories], 10 vols. Shanghai: People’s Art Publishing, 1962.



Qingdai Gongting A

Nie, Chongzheng, comp. Gugong Bowuyuan Cang Qingdai Gongting Huihua [Court Painting of the Qing Dynasty: The Collection of the Palace Museum]. Beijing: Cultural Relics Press, 1992.



Qingdai Gongting B

Nie, Chongzheng, comp. Qingdai Gongting Huihua [Paintings by the Court Artists of the Qing Court]. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1996.



Tumu

Zhongguo Lidai Shuhua Tumu [Illustrated Catalog of Selected Works of Ancient Chinese Painting and Calligraphy]. 25 vols. Beijing: Cultural Relics Publishing, 1986–2001.



Yu, Jianhua, Dictionary



one

Yu, Jianhua, comp. Zhongguo Meishujia Renming Cidian [Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Artists]. Shanghai: Xinhua Press, 1981.

Recognizing Vernacular Painting 1. James Cahill, “Confucian Elements in the Theory of Painting”; Cahill, Chinese Painting, both published in 1960. 2. James Cahill, ed., The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period (exhibition catalog; Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1971). The painting is no. 82 in this cata-

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3.



4. 5. 6.



7.



8.



9. 10.



11.



12.



13.



14. 15. 16.

log; see also figs. 5.8–5.9 in the present book and the accompanying text, which discusses the deception. The “Flower and the Mirror” lectures were delivered as the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California and later at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. They remain unpublished, but the texts, with some added references and corrections, are accessible on my Web site, jamescahill.info, as “Women in Chinese Painting.” James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice. Quoted by Judith Zeitlin, “The Life and Death of the Image,” pp. 232–33. A preliminary presentation of my findings on Chinese erotic paintings, which in important ways contradicts much of what has been written about them, is my essay “Les Peintures érotiques chinoises de la collection Bertholet,” in the exhibition catalog Le Palais du prin­ temps, pp. 29–42. The English text for this is on my Web site, jamescahill.info, as CLP 158. For portraiture in the late period, see Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self. For Buddhist painting of the later periods, see Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the Law (exhibition catalog). For Daoist painting, Stephen Little et al., Taoism and the Arts of China (exhibition catalog). Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” in Words and Images, ed. Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong (exhibition catalog), pp. 333–56. She Ch’eng, “The Painting Academy of the Qianlong Period.” Yang Xin, “Court Painting in the Yongzheng and Qianlong Periods of the Qing Dynasty.” Howard Rogers, “Court Painting under the Qianlong Emperor.” Also Nie Chongzheng’s texts for Qingdai Gongting A and B (two books). An important recent addition is Evelyn Rawski and Jessica Rawson, eds., China: The Three Emperors, 1662–1795 (exhibition catalog). Other studies of Imperial Academy painting will be cited in later chapters. Chu-tsing Li et al., The Chinese Scholar’s Studio (exhibition catalog), p. 43. “Untrammeled,” meaning “free of stifling restraints,” is a common term of praise in Chinese painting criticism, applied generously in the later centuries to the works of literati painters. It should be noted that Li Rihua was by no means working for sheer love of art or for Confucian self-cultivation; like his contemporary Dong Qichang and many other so-called amateurs of the time, he operated his own “painting business.” See Cahill, The Painter’s Practice, pp. 105–7, section based largely on the research of Hsingyuan Tsao. A section of another handscroll by Li, even more amateurish and ill-organized, is reproduced there (fig. 3.34). It was in fact exhibited and published, along with many other “low-class” works from the study collection of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, in Xue Yongnian, Richard Vinograd, and James Cahill, eds., New Interpretations of Ming and Qing Paintings, no. 88. This was the catalog of an exhibition shown at the Central Academy in December 1994. All the leaves of the album are reproduced in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting (exhibition catalog), no. 254. For another leaf and its early-painting source, see Cahill, The Paint­ er’s Practice, figs. 3.25 and 3.26. The colophon is quoted from Li Yufen, Yanke Tiba [Colophons by Wang Shimin], chap. xia 15a–b. It is summarized in the entry for this album in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Paint­ ing; a complete translation is in Ann B. Wicks, “Wang Shih-min (1592–1680) and the Orthodox Theory of Art,” pp. 69–70. See James Cahill, “The Orthodox Movement in Early Ch’ing Painting,” pp. 178–79. For a convenient brief discussion, see James Cahill, The Distant Mountains, pp. 13–14, 27. Bernard Faure, The Will to Orthodoxy. Faure writes of the “Northern school” of Chan as “an orthodox line that would soon be marginalized by its defeat in the contest with the

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18.



19.



20. 21. 22. 23.



24.



25.



26.



27.



28. 29.



30. 31.



32.

Southern school” (Introduction, p. 8). Among the revisionist arguments relating to landscape painting have been those proposed by Richard Barnhart and Jerome Silbergeld—see especially the former’s Painters of the Great Ming (exhibition catalog). I am leaving out, for the present purpose, the artists of the Zhe school and Ming Academy, since they are less implicated in the urban development we are tracing and had less effect on it, and because their period of flourishing was long over by the High Qing. Cited by Anne Burkus-Chasson in her essay on “Three Stars” birthday paintings in Xue Yongnian et al., eds., New Interpretations of Ming and Qing Paintings, p. 53. The passage on Yan Song’s paintings is from Zhai Hao’s Tongsu Bian, and in the reprint she used (Taipei, 1963) is in chap. 8, pp. 87–88. I am grateful to her for this reference. I have used the Zhibuzu Zhai Congshu edition of Tianshui Bingshan Lu, compiled by Zhou Shilin of the early Qing after a Ming manuscript. Wen Jia’s Qinshantang Shuhua Ji, which bears a postface by the author dated to 1569, is appended to this. The Tianshui Bingshan Lu list of Yan’s paintings and calligraphy appears also in Wang Keyu’s Shanhuwang Hualu, preface 1643, chap. 23, and under the title Yan Shi Shuhua Ji in Peiwenzhai Shuhua Pu, chap. 98. I have not attempted an exhaustive study of the relationship among these texts, since I use them here only to make a simple point. For notes on them, see Hin-cheung Lovell, An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Painting Catalogues and Related Texts, pp. 14–16; also Howard Rogers’s “Notes on Wen Jia” and his involvement in this project, Kaikodo Journal 12 (1999): 98, 253–55 at 254. A study of the Yen Song inventory as a record of gift paintings is Kuo Li-ch’eng, “Zengli-hua Yanjiu.” Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things. R. H. van Gulik, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur, pp. 4–6. Richard J. Lufrano, Honorable Merchants, p. 24. Lufrano, Honorable Merchants, pp. 23, 37; the latter statement quoted from William Skinner. A pioneering study was the dissertation by Ginger Cheng-chi Hsü, “Patronage and the ­Economic Life of the Artist in Eighteenth-Century Yangchou Painting,” published, much reworked, as A Bushel of Pearls. See also her “Zheng Xie’s Price List.” An admirable attempt to break this pattern was made by Brown and Chou in their exhibition catalog Elegant Brush, which uses regional and other criteria to organize painting of the Qianlong era. They did not, in my view, sufficiently distinguish minor artists and currents from major ones, but that, to be fair, was not the aim of their exhibition and catalog. I discuss this subject, with references to earlier writings, in The Compelling Image, chaps. 1 and 3. Palace Museum, Beijing; see Yang Xin et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, pl. 103. See Cahill, The Compelling Image, chaps. 3 and 5. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 366. I was set to reading and thinking in this direction by correspondence with Victoria Cass, to whom I am grateful. Andrew Plaks, “Full-Length Hsiao-shuo and the Western Novel,” p. 168. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 374: “for what a work of art sets forth—the course of sentience, feeling, emotion, and the élan vital itself—has no counterpart in any vocabulary. . . . What it conveys is really just one nameless passage of ‘felt life,’ knowable through its incarnation in the art symbol even if the beholder has never felt it in his own flesh.” The term felt life Langer takes from Henry James. She does not apply her phrase especially to “low mimetic” kinds of art, but I have appropriated it for that meaning. For female artists in China, see Marsha Weidner et al., Views from Jade Terrace. Paintings of women (or of the feminized bodhisattva Guanyin) are prominent among paintings by

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33. 34.



35. 36.



37.



38.



39.



40. 41.



42.



43.



44.

women (though not so in this catalog), along with pictures of flowers, birds, and insects. “Pure” landscapes by them, though not entirely unknown, are relatively uncommon. Quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 298. David Johnson, “Communication, Class, and Consciousness in Late Imperial China,” p. 62. Dorothy Ko, in Teachers of the Inner Chambers, chap. 1, “Women and Commercial Publishing,” deals at length with the expanding female readership in the seventeenth century; she points out, however, that the only books specifically published for women are moralizing and didactic texts. See chap. 4, n. 37, for further studies of women’s reading in Ming-Qing times. Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, p. 10. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure, p. 228 and n. 178, quoting Dong Qichang, Yunxuan qingbi lu, p. 25. Liu Yin, after she became the concubine of Qian Qianyi, reportedly took part in male gatherings dressed in male attire; and Dong Xiaowan, while she was Mao Xiang’s beloved concubine, “took a great fancy to paintings, ancient and modern.” She also was present when Dong Qichang wrote a piece of calligraphy for Mao Xiang. See Mao Xiang, Yingmei’an Yiyu, translated by Pan Tze-yen as The Reminiscences of Tung Hsiao-wan, pp. 45, 47. For the Suzhou pian, see Ellen J. Laing, “Suzhou pian and Other Dubious Paintings in the Received Oeuvre of Qiu Ying.” She cites a passage from Arthur Waley’s 1923 An Introduc­ tion to the Study of Chinese Painting, translated from an early nineteenth-century book and describing the activity of a Suzhou family named Qin, who in the early Qing period specialized in forging old master paintings. One of the specialities of the Suzhou copyists and forgers was handscroll paintings copied after originals (now mostly lost) by earlier masters, especially Qiu Ying, with subjects such as famous women of antiquity that would have had a special appeal to female viewers. I have argued elsewhere that the replication of these works was not so much a matter of forgery—the “Qiu Ying” signatures were probably conventional, dignifying the works even when disbelieved—as of allowing purchasers, including many women, to acquire handsome, well-painted versions of desired subjects that they could enjoy, without being much concerned about the (mostly male) collectors’ criterion of “authenticity.” See James Cahill, “Paintings for Women in Ming-Qing China?” Wang Sheng’s erotic album is reproduced in the Musée Cernuschi exhibition catalog Le Palais du printemps, pp. 47–69. For his 1614 painting, see Bimo Jinghua (exhibition catalog), pl. 62. Shen Shigeng’s work of 1642 is in the Tianjin Municipal Museum; see Yiyuan Jijin, pl. 19. The latter painting is discussed, along with Qiu Ying’s, in a discussion of “women waiting” pictures in the first of my Getty lectures “The Flower and the Mirror: Images of Women in Late-Period Chinese Painting,” unpublished but accessible on my Web site (see n. 3 above). Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, p. 33. Kathryn Lowry, The Tapestry of Popular Songs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China, p. 29. For a discussion of this issue, quoting writings of the time, see Cahill, The Distant Moun­ tains, pp. 27–30, “The Soochow Sung-chiang Confrontation.” For leaves from both albums, see Cahill, “Where Did the Nymph Hang?” and “The Emperor’s Erotica.” They will be treated fully in Scenes from the Spring Palace. A provocative parallel could be made with the feminist argument advanced in recent years, principally by the late Chino Kaori, that studies of Japanese Muromachi-period painting have been unduly weighted, in the writings of predominantly male scholars, toward Chinesederived ink-monochrome landscape, the works of Shu¯ bun and Sesshu¯ and others, to the neglect of the “feminine,” Yamato’e-derived tradition of the Tosa school and others in figure compositions (often with women in interiors), flowers-and-birds, etc. This argument was

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45.



46.



47.



48.



49.



50. 51.







t wo

made in a paper she delivered in 1989 at a College Art Association session in San Francisco, which so far as I know is unpublished; a more general discussion by her is “Gender in Japanese Art,” pp. 17–34. Susan Mann, “Women, Families, and Gender Relations,” p. 447. A more extended discussion of how the increase in writing by Qing gentry women had the effect of locating love as a literary theme more within the household than outside it is in Paul S. Ropp, “Love, Literacy, and Laments.” For this transition, and for a discussion of differences in style and content between the poems of courtesan poets and those of gentry women, see K’ang-i Sun Chang, “Liu Shih and Hsu Ts’an,” especially pp. 180ff. See the entry by Howard Rogers for this painting in Kaikodo Journal 20 (Autumn 2001), no. 9, pp. 94, 279–80. A compositionally similar painting, this one of a single woman in her boudoir, by an artist active in nearby Wuxi, is noted in chap. 2, n. 6. The translation (see the appendix), along with the Chinese text, are in Appendix B to Ellen Widmer’s The Beauty and the Book, pp. 298–99. See also pp. 148–51, “Zhou Qi’s Poems and Prose,” and p. 172, where she mentions this painting in a discussion of “inappropriate” themes in guixiu poetry. A contrastingly “masculine” mode of drawing, in heavier, more angular brushstrokes strongly fluctuating in breadth, can be seen in a painting done by the same artist in the same year, 1657, representing a scholar gazing at a hanging-scroll representation of a Buddhist figure (Guanyin?) held by a servant boy. Other elements of the composition also pertain to the scholarly male subject: antique bronzes, the wrapped qin (zither) he holds, a bundle of scrolls, a tipped wine cup—and, of course, the high-mindedness implied by his absorption in an emblem of spirituality. See Duo Yün Xuan auction catalog, “Spring Auction of Art Works, Ancient Calligraphy and Painting,” Shanghai, June 1, 1998, no. 815. See also Cahill, “Paintings for Women in Ming-Qing China?” fig. 7. Hu Shih, “A Historian Looks at Chinese Painting.” Qin Lingyun, Minjian Huagong Shiliao. For another example, see Zuo Hanzhou, ed., Min­ jian Huihua. A recently published volume of genre paintings in the National Museum of China (see Zhongguo Guojia Bowuguan . . . [Fengsu Hua]) is a move in the right direction, but still avoids domestic, quotidian, and truly “low-life” subjects.

Studio Artists in Cities and Court 1. Li Dou, Yangzhou Huafang Lu, II, 15b. Shi was brought to my attention by a passage in Hsü, “Patronage and the Economic Life of the Artist,” p. 150; see also her A Bushel of Pearls, p. 95. 2. Zeitlin, “The Life and Death of the Image,” p. 239. 3. E. A. Strehlneek, Chinese Pictorial Art, pl. 178, which (erroneously) claimed for the picture an inscribed title reading Long Summer Evenings by the Hibiscus Terrace. This factitious title was apparently compounded of two terms that actually do appear in the inscription on the painting: rongqi (hibiscus stream), which was one of the painter’s bynames and appears in his signature on the work (Rongqi Hua Xuan xie); and changxia, which means “long summer” and which is part of the date preceding the signature (sui zai bingchen changxia, “The year is at [the cyclical date] bingchen [1736] changxia [sixth month].” 4. I am grateful to Ch’en Pao-chen for pointing this out to me. 5. For Hua Xuan, see Yu Jianhua, Dictionary, p. 1110 bottom; the information is from Qingchao (or Guochao) Shuhuajia Bilu by Dou Zhen (1847–ca. 1922). 6. One who might be related is Hua Xu, recorded as a specialist in figures and especially pictures of women; see Yu Jianhua, Dictionary, p. 1110. For an extant work by him, with enough

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7.



8.



9.



10.



11. 12.



13.



14.



15.



16.



17. 18.



19.

similarities in style to the Eight Beauties to suggest a family workshop or tradition, see ­Ancients in Profile, no. 36. The title given to it there is Lady Zhen Dressing Herself in the Morning, but there is nothing in the picture or its simple signature to support such an identification; it would appear to be simply a generic picture of a beautiful woman in her boudoir, similar to the 1657 work by Wang Qiao (fig. 1.6). For these and other paintings by Kang Tao in the Tianjin Municipal Museum (now the Tianjin Art Museum), see Tumu, vol. 10, 7–1094–99. This statement is based partly on a quick survey of Hu Jing, Guochao Yuanhua Lu, and partly on the list of Academy painters and their backgrounds in She Ch’eng, “The Painting Academy of the Qianlong Period,” pp. 325–32. For the earlier period, see Daphne Rosen­ z­weig, “Court Painters of the K’ang-hsi Period,” pp. 60ff., where she points out that of twenty-seven court artists of the Kangxi era, fifteen were from Jiangsu, only three from Beijing. By the Qianlong era, more northerners were active in the Academy. Rosenzweig also discusses the routes by which painters came into the court (pp. 66ff.). Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy.” See also Nie Chongzheng’s essay on the Painting Academy under the Qing in Qingdai Gongting A, pp. 1–24 (Chinese) and 25–27 (English summary); this reference on p. 5. For an account of the southern tours or “progresses” made by Kangxi and Qianlong, see Tobie Meyer-Fong, Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou, pp. 174–81 (Kangxi) and 181–88 (Qianlong); also Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback. Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” pp. 345–46. Hironobu Kohara, “Court Painting under the Qing Dynasty,” p. 99; also by Kohara, “Sando¯ Sessetsu-zu.” See Rogers, “Court Painting under the Qianlong Emperor,” pp. 305–6. I depend here also on unpublished notes on the artist by Rogers, written to accompany a painting (formerly in the Kaikodo collection) on which the artist signs with this title (“Painting attendant to the inner court”) and uses a seal with the same title. She Ch’eng, “The Painting Academy of the Qianlong Period,” p. 319. I cannot identify the Zeng Ao mentioned in She’s paper as the artist of the album Gu copied, and assume that this is a mistake for the great portraitist Tseng Qing, who was reportedly one of Gu’s teachers. She Ch’eng does not identify the source of his quotation. An album by Gu of portraits of forty Ming dynasty officials is recorded in Pei Jingfu, Zhuangtaoge Shuhua Lu. Fairy Scattering Flowers, after Ma Hezhi. Reproduced in Ars Asiatica 9 (ca. 1926), pl. LVIII.1. Rogers, “Court Painting under the Qianlong Emperor,” p. 307, and Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting (exhibition catalog), p. 185, in the entry for Leng Mei. The originals of the Wanshou Tu, densely populated cityscapes of Beijing showing the festivities and performances laid on to celebrate the birthday, appear not to have survived; late-eighteenth-century court copies are partly reproduced in Rawski and Rawson, eds., China: The Three Emperors, nos. 24 and 25. The complete compositions were also published by the court in 1616–17 in linear woodblock print renderings; see Monique Cohen, Impressions de Chine, no. 84. Lothar Ledderose et al., Im Schatten höher Bäume (exhibition catalog), no. 66. For the collaborations with Wang Hui and others, see Maxwell Hearn, “Document and Portrait,” n. 40, pp. 187–88. Xu Mei’s leaf for the 1692 landscape album is reproduced in Maxwell Hearn, Cultivated Landscapes, pl. 6b. For the picture of birds and fish, etc., see Gugong Bowuyuan Cang Hua Niao Hua Xuan, pl. 77. Rogers, “Court Painting under the Qianlong Emperor,” p. 306, writes of him as a “functionary in the Court of State Ceremonial.” See also Rogers and Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting, pp. 180–81. For much of the information given here, I am indebted also to

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22.



23.



24.



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26.



27. 28.



29. 30. 31.



32.

the section on Yu Zhiding in the unfinished dissertation by my student Weikuen Tang about the patronage of early Qing painters. The Changchun Yuan was designed by a court painter named Ye Tao, modeled after gardens of the Jiangnan region that Kangxi had seen on his southern tours. In Kangxi’s time it was twice as large as the nearby Yuanming Yuan, which was made for presentation to the prince who would become the Yongzheng emperor. The Yuanming Yuan was greatly expanded under Yongzheng. See Alfreda Murck, “Yüan Chiang: Image Maker,” pp. 229–30. She notes a Yuan Jiang painting dated 1724 and inscribed as having been painted in Yantai, i.e., Beijing (p. 230). See also Nie Chongzheng, Yuan Jiang yu Yuan Yao; and Anita Chung, Drawing Boundaries, especially chaps. 5 and 6. See Qingdai Gongting A, nos. 39–44, and B, nos. 10–20—comprising all but one of the paintings in both volumes from the Yongzheng period. Many more may be in the Beijing Palace Museum collection, unpublished. The series “Portraits of the Yongzheng Emperor in the Twelve Months” (B, 20)—twelve large, elaborate hanging scrolls of palace buildings and figures—particularly suggest the participation of Yuan Jiang. Signed paintings by court artists from the Yongzheng period are rare. A fuller discussion of this problem is in my forthcoming essay “A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings.” I will argue below that the women in some of them, e.g., figs. 2.8–2.10, appear to be in the manner of the Yangzhou master Zhang Zhen and perhaps his son Zhang Weibang; but this is a matter of local and family style, not individual hand. For a detailed biography of Li Shan, see Rogers and Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting, pp. 192–93; a short account is in Rogers, “Court Painting under the Qianlong Emperor,” p. 163. Rogers and Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting, pp. 188 (Hua Yan) and 199 (Luo Ping). For the latter, see also Kim Karlsson, Luo Ping: The Life, Career, and Art of an Eighteenth-Century Chinese Painter. A shorter and somewhat different form of this section was published under the title “The Three Zhangs, Yangzhou Beauties, and the Manchu Court.” At the time I wrote I was unaware of two articles on the subject by Nie Chongzheng: “Qing Gongting Huajia Zhang Zhen, Zhang Weibang, Zhang Tingyan” and “Zhang Tingyan Shengzu Nian Zhiyi.” Revised datings based on Nie’s research have been incorporated here. A small painting of a dog with Zhang Zhen’s signature is owned by Paul Moss, London. Anonymous, Duhua Jilue, p. 22b. The date of this compilation is unknown; it includes artists active through the early nineteenth century. Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” p. 338. Yang, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” pp. 335–36. An “unofficial history” cited by Harold Kahn in Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes, pp. 52–54, describes the elaborate ritual by which a chosen concubine was introduced to the emperor’s bed while he was living in the palace, and adds, “When the emperor is residing in the Summer Palace (Yüan-ming yüan) these practices are disregarded, and he can engage in intercourse whenever he pleases, as ordinary people do. . . . For this reason all of the emperors have spent most of their time in the Yüan-ming yüan.” Although the reliability of information in these unofficial histories is suspect, and Kahn points out that the emperors’ sexual activities were not so severely regulated within the palace, the report that they had more freedom in the Yuanming Yuan is plausible, and helps to explain why both Yongzheng and Qianlong spent so much of their time there. It is also consistent with a report by a foreign observer to be cited below. Young-tsu Wong, A Paradise Lost, p. 76. On Yongzheng’s occupancy of the garden, see pp. 74–80.

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33. Evelyn Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing.” See also Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way. 34. See Wang Yi, Wang Shuqing, and Su Yanzhen, Qingdai Gongting Shenghuo, explanatory texts accompanying pls. 429 (the present painting) and 274 (one of the so-called Twelve Consorts of Yongzheng, to be considered below). For the differences between the dress of Manchu court women and upper-class Han women in the same period, see also Valery M. Garrett, Chinese Clothing: An Illustrated Guide, chaps. 4 (“Manchu Women’s Dress”) and 7 (“Han Chinese Women’s Clothing”). 35. See Evelyn S. Rawski, “Ch’ing Imperial Marriage and Problems of Rulership.” 36. Silas H. L. Wu, Passage to Power, pp. 114–16. 37. Shan Guoqiang, “Gentlewomen Paintings of the Qing Palace Ateliers,” p. 58. Shan quotes also two edicts issued by the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1795–1820) forbidding the wearing of Han Chinese dress by Manchu noblewomen; the second of these suggests that the rule had frequently been breached. See also Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors, pp. 40–41. 38. Quoted in Wang Yi et al., Qingdai Gongting Shenghuo, text for pl. 274. The lines are from the Qianlong emperor’s inscription on a painting by Jin Tingbiao discussed below (fig. 2.11). For a translation of the poem (with these lines rendered differently), see Wu Hung, “Emperor’s Masquerade,” p. 37. 39. Shan Guoqiang, “Gentlewomen Paintings,” p. 59. 40. Wu Hung, “Beyond Stereotypes,” p. 357. 41. For Yongzheng’s inclination to adopt roles, see Wu Hung, “Emperor’s Masquerade,” pp. 25– 41. An anonymous fourteen-leaf album of costume portraits of the Yongzheng emperor, of which eleven leaves are reproduced there (fig. 6a–k), portrays him in a diversity of costumes and roles, most of them adopted from the conventions of Chinese figure and figure-inlandscape paintings. For a comparable work from the late Ming in which a Chinese gentleman is portrayed in five different guises and settings, see Cahill, The Compelling Image, pp. 122–23 and figs. 4.20–24. Other examples of this practice from the Qing period could be cited, obviating the need to find for it a foreign model. 42. Wu, Passage to Power, pp. 95ff. See also Frederick Mote, Imperial China: 900–1800, pp. 884–85. 43. Wu, Passage to Power, p. 90, poem composed on one of the emperor’s southern tours. On Yangzhou as the “national center for the procurement of beautiful women in late Ming times,” see Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, p. 261 and p. 342 n. 19. “The tradition of procuring women from Yangzhou for pleasure,” she writes, “was started by Sui Yang-ti . . . in the early seventh century” and was “followed by generations of emperors after him.” 44. Rawski, “Ch’ing Imperial Marriage,” pp. 181–82. See also Rawski, The Last Emperors, p. 130 and p. 340 n. 14. 45. Zhu Jiajin, “Guan yu Yongzheng Shiqi Shi’erfu Meiren Hua di Wenti,” p. 345; summarized, with the 1732 record translated, in Wu Hung, “Beyond Stereotypes,” p. 340. 46. See Hu Jing, Guochao Yuanhua Lu, HSCS edition, p. 24. A painting by him mentioned there was inscribed by the Qianlong emperor in 1768. A painting of two women, one holding a white rabbit and perhaps representing the moon goddess Chang’e, is in the National Palace Museum, Taipei; see Shinü Hua zhi Mei, no. 32. The dates for Zhang Tingyan given there are 1735–94; no source is given, and this birth date would have him entering the Academy at age nine. See also Nie Chongzheng’s “Zhang Tingyan Shengzu Nian Zhiyi.” 47. A large anonymous court painting, which appears to represent Qianlong’s consorts and their servants in palace buildings within the Yuanming Yuan, deserves attention here but unfortunately is known to me only in a poor black-and-white reproduction. Now kept in the Palace Museum, Shenyang, it is reproduced in the exhibition catalog I Tesori del Palazzo Imperiale del Shenyang, no. 59, p. 295.

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48. Qingdai Gongting A, pl. 88; it is reproduced also as fig. 8 in Cahill, “The Three Zhangs, Yangzhou Beauties, and the Manchu Court.” 49. Rawski, “Ch’ing Imperial Marriage,” pp. 182, 194. 50. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers, pp. 70–72 and p. 246, n. 50. On Qianlong’s alleged escapades with courtesans in the Jiangnan cities on his southern tours, see also Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback, pp. 384–87. 51. Denis Attiret, “A Particular Account of the Emperor of China’s Gardens Near Pekin,” pp. 22– 23, 47–49. 52. I am grateful to Michele Pirazzoli-T’Serstevens, author of the book Giuseppe Castiglione through which I first became aware of the existence of these sketches, for additional information about them, sent in response to my query. John Finlay also gave me valuable advice and research assistance. 53. An illusionistic wall painting of this type, opening a doorway to reveal a woman inside, is reportedly on the upper floor of the Juanqin Zhai (Lodge of Retiring from Hard Work) in the Palace Museum, Beijing, of which the remarkable trompe l’oeil main-floor paintings have been published: see Nie Chongzheng, “Architectural Decorations in the Forbidden City.” Visitors are not allowed to see it because the stairway and upper floor are precarious, and to my knowledge it has not been published. 54. Qingdai Gongting A, p. 260, note to pl. 116. Another collaboration of this kind between Jin Tingbiao and Castiglione, compositionally similar to the painting being considered, is a Yuejun Tu (Inspecting the Steeds), which also situates Qianlong in the upper left and the objects of his gaze below and to the right. See Yu Hui, “Naturalism in Qing Imperial Group Portraiture,” fig. 6. 55. The title written on the work by Qianlong reads “Autumn Cries on the Artemisia Plain.” For the poem, see Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, p. 104. The “Lu Ming” poem itself has an erotic theme: the image of the deer precedes an invitation to sex from a woman. See, for this reading, Paul Rakita Goldin, The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, p. 13. Another painting by Castiglione of deer in an autumn forest, formerly in the palace collection, in which the stag in the foreground gazes back at a herd (or harem) of eight does among trees, was recently offered at auction: see Christie’s Hong Kong, “Fine Classical Paintings and Calligraphy,” October 30, 2000, no. 548; also same, May 30, 2005, no. 1207. 56. On these imperial hunts as conducted under the Manchus, see Rawski, The Last Emperors, pp. 20–21. 57. Zhang Hongxing, The Qianlong Emperor (exhibition catalog), no. 38, an example made for Qianlong in 1763, one of three made during his reign. The antlers were from deer killed in the hunts. See also Rawski, The Last Emperors, pp. 316–17, n. 89. 58. A harrowing account of it is in Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise, vol. 1, pp. 546–69. 59. The works of this artist, whom I term the Qianlong Albums Master, are discussed in my article (in press) “A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period.” See also my “The Emperor’s Erotica.” Non-erotic leaves from his albums are reproduced in the present book, figs. 4.20–4.24. 60. A recorded collaborative work done by Jiao with two other artists is dated 1726; see Nie Chongzheng, “Jiao Bingzhen, Leng Mei ji qi zuopin,” p. 81 in the original. 61. In recent times, and presumably earlier as well, paintings of the god of old age, Shoulao Xing, were hung at birthday celebrations for a man, and paintings of the immortal Magu for a woman, as recounted in H. Y Lowe, The Adventures of Wu, pp. 215–16. For another example of a Magu birthday painting that appears to be by Leng Mei or a close follower, see Christie’s New York auction catalog, June 29, 1984, no. 830. 62. Yang Boda, former director of the Palace Museum, Beijing, and Nie Chongzheng, a now-

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63. 64. 65. 66.



67. 68.



69. 70.



71.



72. 73.



74.



75.



76.



77. 78.

retired curator there who specializes in Qing court painting, have used effectively their special access to Qing court records to clarify many questions regarding the Painting Academy, including the one of Leng Mei’s years of absence from it. Yang Boda, “Leng Mei ji qi Bishu Shanzhuang Tu,” pp. 172–77; repr. in his Qingdai Yuanhua [Qing Academy Painting] (Beijing: Cijin Cheng Chuban She, 1993), pp. 109–30. Nie Chongzheng, “Jiao Bingzhen, Leng Mei ji qi zuopin,” pp. 81–84. An English summary of their findings is in Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, Heritage of the Brush, p. 76. See note 17 above. Reproduced in Qingdai Gongting A, pl. 3:1–10. Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Fall of Imperial China, pp. 95–96. Nie Chongzheng, “Jiao Bingzhen, Leng Mei ji qi Zuopin,” p. 59. An album by Leng Mei dated to 1735 and bearing seals with names used by Prince Hongli before his enthronement leads Nie to speculate that Leng may have stayed with him for part of his time away from the Academy. Zhongguo Gongting Huihua Nianbiao, p. 42. See Qingdai Gongting A, 37. I am indebted to Alfreda Murck for the information that this was Yongzheng’s birthday. Hu Jing, Guochao Yuanhua Lu, HSCS ed., p. 10. The scroll has often been reproduced; for a detail, see Cahill, The Painter’s Practice. p. 48. Hu Jing, Guochao Yuanhua Lu, HSCS ed.; the death date is from a document quoted by Anita Chung, Drawing Boundaries, p. 59. Zhang Geng, Guochao Huazheng Lu, HSCS ed., xu shang p. 99. Works of this kind include “Searching for a Line of Poetry,” dated 1730, in the Palace Museum, Beijing, in Zhongguo Meishu Quanji, vol. 10 (Qing Painting 2), pl. 108; Gazing at Clouds in the Tianjin Municipal Museum, dated 1729; another, undated, in the same museum (Tumu, vol. 10, 7-1320 and 1322); a landscape with figure dated 1733 in the Nanjing Museum (Tumu VII, 24–0927.); and, an especially fine example, a Landscape with Return­ ing Woodcutter dated 1731 in the Shanghai Museum; see Liu Yang et al., Fantastic Moun­ tains (exhibition catalog), no. 75, detail p. 20. An example dated 1734 bears a seal of Prince Hongli, the future Qianlong emperor: see Howard Rogers in Kaikodo Journal 15 (Spring 2000), no. 18 and pp. 265–68, where Rogers cites other dated works. Hu Jing, Guochao Yuanhua Lu, HSCS ed.; for a translation of this passage see Howard Rogers, “A Matter of Taste: The Monumental and Exotic in the Qianlong Reign,” in Elegant Brush, p. 307. Several other works of this type by Chen Mei are, like the Freer picture, attributed to earlier periods and artists; an example is an “anonymous Yuan” painting formerly in the collection of Huang Chün-pi, see Baiyuntang Canghua, pl. 21. The technical excellence and beauty of the paintings, together with Chen Mei’s small reputation in China, encouraged such misrepresentations. The 1725 Nine Egrets, collection of Roy and Marilyn Papp, Phoenix, Arizona, is reproduced in Brown and Chou, Heritage of the Brush, no. 24. The 1730 album titled Nongjia Gushi (Stories of Farmers), in the Palace Museum, Beijing, is cited by Yang Boda, “Leng Mei ji qi Bishu Shanzhuang Tu,” p. 173. Cahill, The Painter’s Practice, pp. 102–12. For Leng Jian, see Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” p. 345; also Yang Xin, “Court Painting in the Yangzheng and Qianlong Periods of the Qing Dynasty,” p. 346. Nie Chongzhen (personal communication) believes that Leng Quan was probably another son of Leng Mei. For a painting of palace ladies by Leng Quan, see Guo Xueshi and Zhang Zikang, eds., Zhongguo Lidai Shinü Huaji, pl. 108.

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thr ee

Adoptions from the West

A slightly longer and more polemical version of the section “Recognizing the Appropriations” was published under the title “Misdirected Scruples” in the Commentary section of Orientations (October 1996): 93–94. 1. On the phenomenon of “Western influence” on Chinese art, see Xiang Da, “European Influences on Chinese Art in the Later Ming and Ch’ing Periods”; the original article, in Chinese, was published in Dongfang Zazhi 27, no. 1 (1930). See also Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art; Mayching Kao, “European Influences in Chinese Art, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries”; and Richard Swiderski, “The Dragon and the Straightedge,” pts. 1–3. 2. Rudolf Wittkower trenchantly stated the salutary effect on European art of adopting elements from outside traditions: “Misinterpretation is the real secret of the vitality of European cosmopolitanism in the arts. Misinterpretation (and I am using the term in lieu of adaptation and translation) made it possible to incorporate the consecutive waves of non-European penetrations into the mainstream of European art.” In Donald M. Reynolds, ed., Selected Lectures of Rudolf Wittkower, p. 192. 3. Michael Baxandall, “Excursus against Influence,” in Patterns of Intention, pp. 58–62. 4. See Gauvin A. Bailey, The Jesuits and the Grand Mogul. The impact of Western pictorial art on Indian painting was of course not limited to copying; for more original work and a discussion of this impact, see Susan Stronge, “Europe in Asia: The Impact of Western Art and Technology in South Asia,” in Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, eds., Encounters, pp. 285–95. 5. Some of these are reproduced and studied in Berthold Laufer, “Christian Art in China.” 6. Wu, Zhang, and Zou are all quoted in Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 72. See also May­ ching Kao, “European Influences in Chinese Art,” p. 273 (Zou Yigui) and p. 275 (Wu Li). 7. Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” pp. 349–50. 8. Gao Shiqi, the Kangxi emperor’s “favorite personal secretary,” who was himself a major collector of paintings, was granted a special audience in 1703 in which the emperor showed him European pictures hanging in the Imperial Theater, and also two portraits of his concubines, one Manchu and one Chinese, painted by Giovanni Gherardini, an Italian painter employed by the Jesuits in China. The emperor offered the view that “the Westerners could paint portraits as wonderfully as Gu Hutou,” i.e., Gu Kaizhi. Gao Shiqi, who was leaving the emperor’s service, was presented with three European paintings, among other items. See Fu Lo-shu, A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations (1644–1820), vol. 1, pp. 112– 13, “The K’ang-hsi Emperor Is a Lover of Western Art and Music.” For Kangxi’s “stupefied” and reverential response to European religious paintings presented to him by Matteo Ricci, see Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, pp. 86–87. 9. Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, p. 79. 10. Westernizing elements appear also in the works of late Ming–early Qing artists active in Song jiang, such as Zhao Zuo (ca. 1570–ca. 1633) and Lu Wei (d. 1716; but these artists, being primarily landscapists, are outside our present concern. For Zhao Zuo, see Cahill, The Compelling Image, pp. 83–86, and The Distant Mountains, pp. 70–79. For Lu Wei, see ­Cahill, “Brushlessness and Chiaroscuro in Early Ch’ing Landscape Painting.” 11. The Compelling Image, pp. 15–26; cf. The Distant Mountains, pp. 56–59. 12. A good discussion of these is Hironobu Kohara, “Sando¯ Sessetzu-zu.” Examples of the prints, which survive in large numbers, are reproduced in many places; a good selection is in the Machida City Print Museum catalog Chu¯goku no Yo¯ fu¯ga-ten, pls. 109–33. 13. Some distinctly bizarre Westernized paintings are still to be found in old collections, often ascribed to such artists as Jiao Bingzhen and Lang Shining. For examples, see Machida City Print Museum, Chu¯goku no Yo¯ fu¯ga-ten (exhibition catalog), pls. 73–74.

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14. For some of these statements and a brief treatment of Tseng Qing’s portraits, see Cahill, The Distant Mountains, pp. 213–17. 15. Cahill, “Wu Pin and His Landscape Paintings,” fig. 13; a section of Fan Qi’s painting is reproduced there as fig. 14, and the whole in Osvald Sirén, Chinese Painting, vol. 6, pl. 359. 16. Cahill, The Compelling Image, pp. 168–83, offers an account of Gong Xian’s development that considers how his style was formed in part from his exposure to European pictures. Gong Xian’s statement about “places where no one has ever gone” is on p. 181. His great Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines (Cahill, The Compelling Image, color pl. 10, fig. 5.40) best exemplifies the qualities ascribed to him here. 17. In the section of The Compelling Image cited in the previous note, I adduce comparisons that bring out these derivations. 18. Arthur Waley, Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting, p. 251. 19. For Daocun, see Yu Jianhua, Dictionary, p. 1242; according to Yu, an album by him dated to 1709 is in a Japanese collection. The entry for him in Huaren Buyi (in Qing Huazhuan Jiyi Sanzhong; cf. chap. 2, n. 23) states that he lived in Huai’an and painted landscapes in the manner of Kuncan. Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, “Fine Chinese Paintings,” June 1, 1988, no. 72, dates this album to 1706, whereas Sotheby’s Hong Kong, “Fine Chinese Paintings from the Currier Collection,” May 1, 2000, no. 109, reads the date as 1766 and gives Daocun’s death date as 1792. Further research is needed to resolve the discrepancy. 20. An example is in Xue Yongnian, Richard Vinograd, and James Cahill, eds., New Interpre­ tations of Ming and Qing Paintings, no. 42, a painting in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. Others of his works are listed in the commentary to that picture. 21. An album of twelve landscapes with figures by Wang Yun, dated to 1722, exhibits Wang’s close stylistic relationship with Yuan Jiang, and is, like most of Yuan’s paintings, in the semiWesternized manner; see Wang Hanzao Renwu Shanshui Ce. 22. Hidemi Kondo¯ , for instance, in “Shen Nanpin’s Japanese Roots,” argues that scholars who trace the source of Shen’s realism to Western art are in error, since its real source is in Song painting and the Ming academic tradition. Kondo¯ ’s research is valuable and his argument has much merit, but his is another example of the frequently encountered fallacy that an artist’s use of native sources must have precluded his use of nonnative ones. It scarcely needs repeating that all the artists to whom I ascribe some derivations from Western style used them in a context of Chinese style; it is exactly the successful fusions that must have made the paintings, for their audiences, both acceptably Chinese and interestingly novel. On Shen Quan, see also Zhou Zhiyin and Hidemi Kondo¯ , Shen Quan Yanjiu; and Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting, pp. 186–87. 23. Cahill, “Wu Pin and His Landscape Paintings”; The Compelling Image, chap. 3; and The Distant Mountains, pp. 176–80. 24. One of the largest of the Jesuit missions was in Nanjing, and local literati came to admire books in its library. See Michael Sullivan, “Some Possible Sources of European Influence on Late Ming and Early Ch’ing Painting,” this reference on p. 597. For the Record of the Year’s Holidays album, see Wen C. Fong and James C. Y. Watt, Possessing the Past, pl. 206a–d. 25. See Nie Chongzheng, “Qing Shunzhi Chao Gongting Huajia Huang Yingshen.” Nie recognizes no sign of European style in Huang’s works and believes that the mixed Sino-Western manner began to develop only in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods, after European missionary artists had become active at court. 26. See Kokka, 687 (June 1949) for a reproduction of part of this scroll, representing the environs of Suzhou and Tiger Hill. According to the accompanying text, the scroll is signed and bears a seal of the Yongzheng emperor. It was owned then by Yamamoto Yoshitsugu. 27. For a thorough study of this series, see Paul Pelliot, “À propos de Keng tche t’ou.” A rare copy

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28.



29.



30.



31. 32. 33. 34.



35. 36. 37.



38. 39.



40.



41.



42.

of the original woodblock-printed edition is partly reproduced and discussed in Philip K. Hu, comp. and ed., Visible Traces, no. 17. A painted copy that purports to be the original but certainly is not, bearing imperial seals, possibly one of many painted copies made by lesser Academy masters for dissemination by the emperor, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; see Nathalie Monnet, Le Gengzhitu. For instance, in a 1663 work by Jan Steen (1626–79), A Woman at Her Toilet, in which a lute lies across the sill of the doorway leading to a woman’s boudoir, linking the foreground, as an extension of the viewer’s space, with the room beyond. For the Steen painting, which is in Windsor Castle, see Perry Chapman et al., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, no. 19. Zhang Geng, Guochao Huazheng Lu, HSCS ed., chap. 3, pp. 31–32; translation from Kao, “European Influences,” p. 272. The Jesuits had been reinstated in 1671 in the Bureau of Astronomy, with Ferdinand Ver­ biest (1623–88) as director, after a period of banishment. See Arnold H. Rowbotham, Mis­ sionary and Mandarin, pp. 92–94. For the Jesuit teaching of perspective and other techniques of illusionistic painting to the Chinese, see Sullivan, “Some Possible Sources of European Influence”; also Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, chap. 2: “China and European Art, 1600–1800,” especially p. 46. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing. Quoted in Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, p. 80. Rowbotham, Missionary and Mandarin, p. 183. On this book and its 153 engravings, published in Antwerp in 1593, see Sullivan, The Meet­ ing of Eastern and Western Art, pp. 46–50. David Howard and John Ayers, China for the West, vol. 1, p. 35. Howard and Ayers, China for the West, vol. 2, p. 632, no. 658. An excellent study of how space is manipulated for expressive purposes in Dutch seventeenthcentury painting is Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes. Nadine Orenstein, associate curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, kindly sent me copies of many Dutch mezzotints from the late seventeenth century that featured the drawn-back curtain, along with French prints from about the same time portraying women looking into mirrors (personal communication, March 1998); I am grateful to her for calling these to my attention. Some are suggestively close in composition to the Leng Mei painting. Sullivan, “Some Possible Sources of European Influence,” p. 607. Richard Swiderski, “The Dragon and the Straightedge,” is a long, well-documented study of this phenomenon that nevertheless, I believe, overemphasizes linear perspective to the neglect of other Chinese borrowings from European pictorial practice. My inability to read Spanish prevents me from appraising properly Elisabetta Corsi’s La fábrica de las ilusiones, said to be an important book on Chinese artists’ learning and uses of Western perspective. An English translation is projected. Wall paintings: Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” pp. 349–50. For surviving examples in the palace, see Nie Chongzheng, “Architectural Decoration in the Forbidden City”; Wu Hung, “Emperor’s Masquerade”; and Nie Hui, “Qinggong Tong jing Xianfa-hua Tanxi.” Uki’e (literally, “floating pictures”), i.e., perspective prints, as a special type within ukiyo’e (pictures of the floating world), began to appear in Japan in the 1730s and 1740s. For a discussion of them, see Timon Screech, The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan, pp. 102–4. Another album of palace-lady paintings, again depicting their activities in the twelve months of the year, was painted by the court artist Yao Wenhan (active 1739–52) in 1743, based on poems by the Qianlong emperor. See Christie’s New York, June 29, 1984, no. 829.

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43. Howard Rogers, “Court Painting under the Qianlong Emperor,” p. 307. 44. This topic is discussed more fully in my unpublished paper “A Group of Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period.” 45. A notable example is the Landscape with Rainstorm in the National Museum, Stockholm; see James Cahill, Fantastics and Eccentrics in Chinese Painting (exhibition catalog), no.  22. 46. Eight-leaf album, ink and colors on silk; Freer Gallery of Art, reg. no. 14.24–31. An inscription by an identifiable early Qing writer named Liu Hualiang includes a cyclical date that must correspond to 1708, and the album dates from about that time or a bit earlier. See Cahill, The Compelling Image, fig. 3.22. 47. For a painting that appears to link Leng Mei to a Cui Zizhong lineage, probably an early work by Leng (the form of his signature differs from those on others of his works), depicting two foreign-looking men watching a boy atop a bizarre, illusionistically shaded elephant, see Tumu, vol. 18, shan 2–16; also (in color) in Zhongguo Huihua Quanji, vol. 27, pl. 170. 48. Rawski, The Last Emperors, p. 120. 49. See Kim Karlsson, Luo Ping, chaps. 6 and 7, on Luo’s late-life sojourns in Beijing and his patronage there. 50. The work seems to have been preserved in recent times in Japan; a label on it reads “Nihon Kokin Kaiga Tenrankai” (Exhibition of Old and New Paintings [in?] Japan), and an inscription in the lid of the Japanese-style box reads “Formerly owned by the Xuantong Emperor” (r. 1908–12). Another signed meiren painting by Jiao Bingzhen, this one outdoors with the woman holding a fishing pole and leaning on a rock beneath a waterside willow, was offered at auction more recently, and appears likely to be genuine: see Christie’s Hong Kong, “Fine Classical Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy,” May 28, 2007, no. 841. 51. A small imaginary portrait of Li Qingzhao, in the Palace Museum, Beijing. See Zhongguo Meishu Quanji, vol. 10, pl. 108. 52. Cui Hui, along with Gao Qipei and Li Shizhuo, have all been called Korean on the basis of this designation of Sanhan as their place of origin. Marc Wilson and Kwan S. Wong point out, however, that Sanhan can designate either an area of North Korea or a region east of the Liao River near present-day Liaoyang, and that Li Shizhuo came from the latter; see Eight Dynas­ ties of Chinese Painting, pp. 377–78. Possibly the term refers to Korean ancestry, and was used for Korean bannermen who relocated to northeastern China after participating in the Manchu conquest. I am grateful to Ms. Hwang Jung-yon, a graduate student in the Academy of Korean Studies in Seoul, for help and references on this problem, which I must leave unresolved. 53. An exception might be the original of what I take to be a copy after a work by Cui Hui, discussed in chap. 5: see fig. 5.24. This bears a (copied) poetic inscription by Cui. 54. The painting is known to me only through an image that was briefly on the Internet; it was posted there in 2005 by a Beijing auction company called Arttrade, and sold to an unknown buyer for about U.S. $50,000. The image, which has now been removed from the Web site, was discovered there and passed on to me by Dr. J. P. Park, to whom I am indebted for the discovery and for much other help. Park is currently trying to locate the auction company and the owner in Beijing. 55. See Ellen Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy and the Place of the Woman Writer in Late Imperial China”; Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, pp. 91–96. 56. Christie’s New York, “Fine Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy,” June 1, 1989, no. 88. 57. Kinjiro¯ Harada, comp., Shina Meiga Ho¯ kan, pl. 944. four

The Artists’ Repertories 1. Birthday pictures: see Xue Yongnian, comp., Kunluntang Shuhua Ji, no. 52, a large composition with numerous figures representing the birthday celebration of an elderly man.

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2. 3.



4. 5.



6. 7.



8.



9. 10. 11.



12. 13.



14.



15.

Portraits: his signed portrait of a Manchu nobleman (?) before a folding landscape screen was sold at auction: see Sotheby’s New York, “Fine Chinese Paintings,” March 18, 1997, no. 53. For a portrait by him dated 1663 in the Suzhou Museum, see Tumu, vol. 7, Su 8–065. An imaginary portrait of a Han statesman dated to 1673 was owned by the late Alice Boney. A portrait dated 1687 is in the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum; see Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, no. 255. A portrait of a contemporary in handscroll form, done by Gu in his eighty-fourth year (i.e., in 1688), is in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne. The well-known anonymous portrait of the young Kangxi emperor writing with a brush (Qing­ dai Gongting B, pl. 1), judging from its style, also may be his work; it was done in the mid- or late 1670s when Kangxi was in his early twenties and Gu was still at court. The depiction of rugs and furniture in the Kangxi portrait compares closely with similar imagery in Gu’s paintings. David T. Roy, trans. and annot., The Plum in the Golden Vase. Deng Chun, Hua Ji, p. 123; translation in Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds., Early Chi­ nese Texts on Painting, p. 136. Craig Clunas, “Gifts and Giving in Chinese Art,” p. 8. The latter judgment is made about flower paintings by Zhao Chang; see Mi Fu, Hua Shi, pp. 35–36. Hironobu Kohara, “Court Painting under the Qing Dynasty,” p. 100. Another relatively early example is a small painting attributed to Li Song (active ca. 1190–ca. 1230) in the National Palace Museum, Taipei; see Gugong Shuhua Tulu (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1989), vol. 2, p. 145. This is not a family scene; all the figures in it are men, excepting a maid at upper right. It portrays people drinking in the entry hall of a large house, and visitors coming to pay their New Year’s respects, as well as boys setting off firecrackers. It appears to be early Ming in date. Collection of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; published in Xue Yongnian, Richard Vinograd, and James Cahill, eds., New Interpretations of Ming and Qing Paintings, pp. 118, 120, entry by Wang Xiaomei, where it is called “anonymous Ming.” For these, see Ellen J. Laing, “From Sages to Revellers.” Yoshiho Yonezawa, “Shin-ga Taji Zu.” Still another version is reproduced in Qingdai Gongting B, pl. 31; the figure groups correspond closely to those in the signed version discussed here, but they are shown in a larger palace setting. Another work of this type painted jointly by several Qianlong Academy masters, including Yao Wenhan, is reproduced in Gugong Bowuyan Socang Zhongguo Lidai Minghua Ji, vol. 2, pl. 239. Compositionally it is closer to the “Qiu Ying” painting (fig. 1.2), and the principal figure is not the emperor but, presumably, some high official for whom the painting was done. Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” pp. 346–49. Yang, “The Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” p. 348. The differences between Imperial Academy and outside paintings of similar subjects and styles are further discussed in my essay “A Group of Northern Figure Paintings of the Qianlong Period” (in press). I cite there, and quote from briefly, a review by Souren Melikian of the 2006 China: The Three Emperors exhibition (edited by Evelyn S. Rawski and Jessica Rawson) complaining about the low aesthetic interest of the elaborate Academy paintings that made up much of the show; his review offers, I comment, “a welcome break with a general reluctance to recognize the dullness of a great deal of Qing Academy painting.” A cruder painting of this type, with some of the folk-art character of the printed nianhua, by an anonymous painter of the Huizhou (Anhui) region, is reproduced in Huizhou Rong­ xiang Yishu, p. 47. It is there titled Jiaqing Tu (Family Auspicious Picture). For two typical examples, see Cahill, The Painter’s Practice, figs. 1.14 and 3.9.

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16. Jerome Silbergeld, “Chinese Concepts of Old Age and Their Role in Chinese Painting, Painting Theory, and Criticism”; and Ju-hyung Rhi, “The Subjects and Functions of Chinese Birthday Paintings.” 17. Guo Weiqu, Song Yuan Ming Qing Shuhuajia Nianbiao, p. 219. A God of Old Age by Gu Jianlong dated 1683 is in the National Palace Museum, Taipei; see Gugong Shuhua Tulu, vol. 10, p. 235. 18. Anne Burkus-Chasson offers a study of this subject in relation to several Ming-Qing examples in Xue Yongnian et al., eds., New Interpretations of Ming and Qing Painting, pp. 53–54, including a detailed reading of the one by Zhao Wei reproduced here as fig. 4.10. 19. See E. A. Strehlneek, Chinese Pictorial Art, pp. 284–85. 20. She Ch’eng, “The Painting Academy of the Qianlong Period,” p. 330. 21. Handscroll: see Zhuang Zhifa, “Xie Sui Gengzhi Tu Yanjiu.” Landscape: see Qingdai Gongting A, no. 121. 22. For two typical examples, see Cahill, The Painter’s Practice, fig. 1.15. 23. Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting, p. 153. Three versions of a painting of this theme done by Chen Hongshou and his studio are reproduced in Cahill, The Painter’s Practice, fig. 3.36. 24. Formal portraits of couples can be seen in Ming painting; I refer here to informal, particularized family portraits, like the single portraits with individualized settings that were popular from the late Ming. 25. See chap. 2, n. 41, for a reference to this late-Ming example and to an imperial court production from the Yongzheng era imitating this kind of series, with the Yongzheng emperor playing the (quite imaginary) role of the benevolent farmer. 26. See Ming-Qing Fengsu Hua, no. 68. 27. This development is traced in detail in my unpublished book on Chinese erotic painting; it is discussed also in my essay (in French) in the Musée Cernuschi exhibition catalog Le Palais du Printemps. 28. The leaf, remounted as a hanging scroll and attributed to Qiu Ying with interpolated seals, was offered at auction (Christie’s New York, June 4, 1993, no. 135) and is now in a private collection in Taipei. It was originally part of an album of large leaves (Album P) published under the title Naishi Xingle [Pleasures of the Age] by the Yiyuan Zhenshang She, Shanghai, probably in the 1940s. Beneath the title is the note, “Formerly owned by the Qing court,” indicating that this was another palace production, probably removed from the palace in the 1920s. For paintings by the Qianlong Albums Master, see my article “The Emperor’s Erotica,” also my forthcoming “A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period.” 29. John Meskill, Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangtze Delta, pp. 157–74, “The New Temper”; also pp. 141–55, “The New Abundance.” The lines quoted are on p. 164. Kathryn Lowry makes the same point, writing that qing in late-Ming literature is an “emotion serving self-interest (si) rather than the interests of kin or other social networks,” as it had done before. See her “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling,” p. 247. 30. Victoria Cass, Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies and Geishas of the Ming, pp. 28–30. 31. Cass, Dangerous Women, p. 30. 32. Mao Xiang, The Reminiscences of Tung Hsiao-wan. 33. Good studies of women’s reading in Ming and Qing times include Joanna F. Handlin, “Lü K’un’s New Audience”; Susan Mann, “ ‘Fuxue’ (‘Women’s Learning’) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801)”; Dorothy Ko, “Pursuing Talent and Virtue”; and Anne E. McLaren, “Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables,” esp. pp. 67–76, “Chantefable Audiences: the Emergence of a Female Readership.” See also the same author’s chapter “Constructing New

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34.



35. 36.



37.



38.



39.



40.



41.



42. 43.



44. 45.



46.

Reading Publics in Late Ming China,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, especially pp. 160–63; she suggests the possibility of distinguishing different “female literacies.” Women’s reading in China is well summed up also in Ellen Widmer’s The Beauty and the Book, pp. 3–22. Cass, Dangerous Women, p. 15. Her n. 43, p. 127, supplies references to English-language discussions of qing. Especially enlightening is Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, chap. 2, “The Enchantment of Love in The Peony Pavilion.” For the album leaf, see Cahill, “Where Did the Nymph Hang?” fig. 5. All the leaves of this album are reproduced in Cahill, “Paintings for Women in Ming-Qing China?” The color plates for that article were mistakenly omitted from the first printing of the journal (Nan Nü 8), and were sent later to subscribers; they may be missing from some library copies. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Women’s Chambers, pp. 202–7 and passim. On poetry clubs within households, and on women’s literacy in this period more generally, see also Irving Yucheng Lo, “Daughters of the Muses of China,” esp. pp. 41–42. Much information on women’s literary networks is found in the commentaries on individual Ming-Qing female poets in Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China. The place of bound feet in women’s bonding is treated in Dorothy Ko, “The Written Word and the Bound Foot,” and in Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty, chap. 6, “Binding, Weaving, Chatting: Female Bonding and Writing.” More recent is Dorothy Ko’s book Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Dorothy Ko, in “The Written Word and the Bound Foot,” p. 98, writes that scenes of men fondling women’s bound feet are “often portrayed in erotic paintings,” while “women were never depicted as fondling their own feet.” The opposite, however, would seem to be true: these two leaves appear to depict the latter practice, while no examples of the former are known to me. Paintings in which men gaze at women’s bound feet are of course common. Gary Baura, entry for catalog no. 50 in Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the Law, pp. 362–64. Chün-fang Yü, “Guanyin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara,” in Marsha Weidner et al., Latter Days of the Law, esp. pp. 166–69, “Guanyin as Seductress.” This theme is further explored by Yü in her book Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara, pp. 421ff. Gary Baura, in Marsha Weidner et al., Latter Days of the Law, p. 362. A set of the prints is in the Machida City Print Museum, Tokyo; see their catalog Chu¯ goku no Yo¯ fu¯ga-ten, pp. 336–54. The picture is no. 41 in the series. Another set is in the Spencer Collection at the New York Public Library print room. The printed series is sometimes dated to the late Ming period, but from the style and technique, a dating in the early or mideighteenth century seems more likely. The correspondence of print and painting was first pointed out in a paper written by Karl Debreczeny for my seminar given at the University of Chicago in spring 1998. Notably in Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the Law. Good recent writings on narrative pictorial prints include Dajuin Yao, “The Pleasure of Reading Drama”; and Robert E. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China. Scholarship on narrative painting has been greatly enriched by the publication of Julia Murray’s book Mirror of Morality. Murray deals principally with the early periods, through the Song, and comments (p. 5) on the critical dismissal of narrative painting in later centuries. For the Roupu Tuan illustrations, see Christie’s New York, “Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art,” December 1–2, 1994, no. 308. The album comprised eight leaves of illustrations, eight of text. For the two albums from the Liaozhai series, see Christie’s New York,

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47.



48.



49.



50.



51. 52. 53. 54.



55. 56. 57.



58.



59.

“Fine Classical and Modern Chinese Paintings,” November 30, 1984, no. 787. Another album of Liaozhai illustrations. forty-six leaves, is in the National Museum of China; see Zhongguo Guojia . . .(Lishi Hua), pp. 296–305; still another, twenty-four leaves of fine quality, was offered in China Guardian, Beijing auction “Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy,” May 12–13, 2007, no. 1201. For the album ascribed to Fang Xiaowei, see Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, “Fine Chinese Paintings,” May 31, 1989, no. 74. The information that Fang served in the Kangxi court is from the catalog note; I have not located him. Other such series include a set of twelve leaves with a signature (presumably interpolated) of the Ming master Fan Mu or Xingwu (Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, “Chinese and Japanese Decorative Works of Art,” October 2–3, 1985, no. 58); and a fifty-nine-leaf album of illustrations to Xixiang Ji, eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, in which the anonymous pictures appear above passages of printed text (Christie’s New York, “Fine Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy,” June 1, 1989, no. 137). Complete black-and-white reproduction in Kokka 1163 (1992); color reproductions of all leaves in Gen Dai no Kaiga (exhibition catalog), no. 48. The versions published in old reproduction albums are Qiu Wen Hebi Xixiang Zhenji Quance and Qiu Wen Hezhi Xixiang Ji Tuce. For a series of Xixiang Ji illustrations in handscroll form ascribed to Qiu Ying, with text by Wen Zhengming dated 1532, which appears from the reproduction to be better than these, see Christie’s New York, “Fine Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy,” December 1, 1986, no. 17. A fine nineteen-leaf album of Western Wing illustrations, with seals of Qiu Ying and facing leaves of textual excerpts with seals of Wen Zhengming, was offered for sale in China Guardian, Beijing, auction “Classical Paintings and Calligraphy,” June 3, 2006, no. 330. For another leaf, depicting the scene in which Cui Yingying appears to Scholar Zhang in a dream, see Deborah Rudolph, Impressions of the East, p. 125. The ways in which the best woodblock prints achieve a degree of independence from painting, exploiting the special nature of the medium, would be the subject of another study. See Cahill, “Paintings for Women?” pp. 40–50. For the whole album, see Tumu, vol. 22, jing 1–4805. Translation from David Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase, vol. 1, p. 496, n. 5. Fu’s fan painting is reproduced in Weidner, ed., Views from Jade Terrace, no. 32; for information on her see p. 179. Cass, Dangerous Women, pp. 9–17. Cass, Dangerous Women, p. 23. A complete annotated translation by David T. Roy is under way; the first sixty chapters have been translated in the three volumes published so far. See The Plum in the Golden Vase. Eight leaves are in Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City; seventeen formerly in the collection of Andrew Franklin, London; thirteen formerly in the collection of C. C. Yeh, Taichung. The Franklin and Yeh groups have recently been further dispersed in auctions. The remainder are presumably still in Taiwan, where the whole series was until recently owned by the late Zhang Xueliang (1898–2001), whose father, the warlord Zhang Zuolin (1873–1928), is said to have looted the albums from the Forbidden City while he was briefly in control of Beijing in 1926—or, in an alternative version, from the Shenyang Palace during the longer period (1918–28) when he was military governor of Manchuria. It would appear that Zhang Xueliang during his years in Taiwan gave groups of leaves as political and other gifts to friends and acquaintances who—because of the erotic nature of some of the images— are reluctant to acknowledge ownership of them, so that tracing their whereabouts has proved difficult. See Cahill, “Where Did the Nymph Hang? where the argument is made for this attribution.

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60. This passage in the novel is translated in Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase, vol. 1, pp. 413–18. 61. Maxwell Hearn, “Document and Portrait.” On the tours themselves, see Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback. A good general discussion of cityscapes painted by Qing court artists is in Anita Chung, Drawing Boundaries, pp. 91–100. 62. The Kangxi emperor’s tour is recorded in twelve scrolls by Wang Hui and others, who began work in 1691. For five of the scrolls, nos. 1 and 9–12, along with a preliminary drawing for another, see Qingdai Gongting B, 5–6. 63. From the accompanying text to the book in which this scroll is reproduced, Shengshi Zisheng Tu, descriptive text, unpaginated, for pl. 77. This is a valuable description of a shop that sold paintings of the kind this book is about. 64. A similar scroll appeared recently at auction in Christie’s Hong Kong, “Fine Classical Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy,” May 30, 2005, no. 1085. Painted in 1774 by the little-known figure master Yao Zai from Wuxi, it depicts at length (680 cm) the scenery along the route taken by the official Bi Wan (1730–95) in returning home upon retirement; it was presumably painted for presentation to him on that occasion. More polished and less entertaining than the Franklin scroll, it portrays, along with Bi himself in his boat, the buildings, other boats, bridges, and a great many people along the canals. Although two scrolls with similar themes and purposes do not constitute proof of a type, they suggest one; more examples may turn up. 65. Cao Xueqin, Honglou Meng, trans. by David Hawkes as The Story of the Stone, vol. 3, pp. 311–16. 66. This is a small joke—there is indeed a painting of this kind in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a Tang Yin signature, an old acquisition, no longer credited as a work by that great Ming master. 67. This was the late Andrew Franklin, who had spent years in Taiwan as the British consul and had collected a large and very mixed assemblage of paintings and prints, presumably purchased on the local market. I visited him in his London retirement home in November 1996. The collection has been dispersed, some of it (including this scroll) given to the City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the remainder sold at auction. I am grateful to his son-in-law Kirit Vaidya for help in locating the scroll. fi v e

Beautiful Women and the Courtesan Culture 1. Paul S. Ropp, “The Seeds of Change,” p. 19. See also Ropp, “Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late Imperial China”; and Victoria Cass, Dangerous Women, pp. 6–17. On the pleasure quarters of the great Jiangnan cities, see also Tobie Meyer-Fong, Building Cul­ ture in Early Qing Yangzhou, pp. 133–36; quoting from an unpublished essay by Jonathan Hay, she terms them “leisure zones.” 2. The term geisha is used for them, and defended, by Victoria Cass in her book Dangerous Women. Earlier, it had been proposed as the best rendering for the Chinese ji by Edward Schafer, in his privately circulated Schafer Sinological Papers, vol. 2: Notes on T’ang Geisha, 1984. Dorothy Ko (Teachers of the Inner Chambers, p. 256) likens them to the Japanese tayu¯ ; Stephen Owen in The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü, p. 131, calls them women of the demimonde. Cass’s chapter titled “Geishas,” pp. 25–46, is a very perceptive account of the status of these women and their relationships with prominent men. 3. For an account of the development of this theme in Ming-Qing fiction, see Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, pp. 99–159. McMahon further divides the genre into two subgenres: the chaste beauty-scholar romance and the erotic scholar-beauty romance. In romantic literature, the jiaren of the phrase was often a young woman of good family, not a prostitute.

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4. The identification of this painting’s subject has been called into question by Jan Stuart, who believes it may portray only a generic scholar-beauty romance, or a young man dallying with a courtesan. See her “Two Birds with the Wings of One,” pp. 25–28. 5. Cass, Dangerous Women, p. 30. 6. McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, p. 14. 7. Wang Shifu, The Moon and the Zither: The Story of the Western Wing. 8. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth, pp. 179–83. 9. This episode is recounted in the second volume of David Roy’s translation, The Plum in the Golden Vase, pp. 20–23. 10. I acquired the old photo from the estate of Archibald Wenley, director of the Freer Gallery of Art, upon his death in 1962; he must have received it from the Shanghai dealer E. A. Strehl­neek during his early years in China. Writing on the back, initialed by Strehlneek, identifies the painting as “Imperial lady with attendant” and calls it a “eulogic painting ­presented by Tang Ying [sic] to the palace, described by Tai Yen Ko . . . Price: Mex. $950.” A long inscription, not entirely readable in the photo but containing the “signature” of Tang Yin and a dedication to some high official, is written in the upper left of the painting; it is obviously a later interpolation. 11. Yu Huai, quoted in Howard Levy, A Feast of Mist and Flowers, p. 37. 12. Anne Birrell, trans., New Songs from a Jade Terrace, pp. 12–13: “Since the sleeve is of a piece with a woman’s dress, to describe a woman’s sleeves and her arm suggests entrée to more intimate parts of her body.” 13. Paul F. Rouzer, “Watching the Voyeurs,” p. 20. 14. For a detailed, unromanticized account of the choosing and purchase of a concubine in early Qing Yangzhou, see the essay “The Jades of Yangzhou” by Zhang Dai (1597–1684), translated in David Pollard, The Chinese Essay, pp. 90–92. 15. Susan Mann, “Grooming a Daughter for Marriage,” p. 224, n. 16, citing a book by Wang Shu-nu. A more recent and detailed account by Mann is in her Precious Records, pp. 125–42. 16. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, pp. 22, 255. Ko’s section on “The Floating World of Courtesans and Singing Girls,” pp. 252–56, is a good account of the changing ­position of these women, with illuminating comparisons with French courtesans and Japanese tayu¯. 17. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, p. 342, n. 11. On this issue, see also Ropp, “Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late Imperial China,” pp. 19–20. 18. Mann, Precious Records, p. 122. 19. For another good account of this development, see Kang-i Sun Chang, “Ming-Qing Women Poets and the Notions of ‘Talent’ and ‘Morality,’ ” especially pp. 253–54. 20. Keith McMahon, “Eroticism in Late Ming, Early Qing Fiction,” p. 223. 21. The story is “The Painted Wall,” from Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi; see Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, pp. 216–17. 22. Wai-yee Li, “The Late Ming Courtesan,” pp. 49–50. 23. Some of the references and arguments of this section were presented earlier in Cahill, “Where Did the Nymph Hang?” 24. Several stories of these kinds appear in Feng Menglong’s Qingshi [History of Qing], late Ming, in the section titled hua huan or “Illusions in Painting.” 25. See n. 17 above. Instances of meiren portraits and paintings that figure in literary works are discussed in Judith Zeitlin, “Making the Invisible Visible,” and “The Life and Death of the Image.” The locus classicus for this theme is of course Mudan Ting (The Peony Pavilion); for a discussion of the role of the portrait there, see Tina Lu, Persons, Roles, and Minds, pp. 28–62. Zeitlin, discussing in both articles this “slippage” between portraits and generic pic-

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27. 28.



29. 30.



31.



32.



33. 34.



35. 36.



37.



38.



39. 40.



41.

tures of beauties, cites a passage in chap. 63 of Jin Ping Mei in which a posthumous portrait of Li Ping’er is praised as a “beautiful woman picture.” This, too, is a literary device, a way for characters in the novel to extol Li Ping’er’s beauty. Examples of this practice are discussed in James Cahill, The Compelling Image, chap. 4, “Ch’en Hung-shou: Portraits of Real People and Others.” Li Dou, Yangzhou Huafang Lu, pp. 2, 13b. See n. 17 above; a number of them are reproduced also in Zeitlin, “Making the Invisible Visible” and “The Life and Death of the Image.” For other meiren hanging scrolls represented in woodblock illustrations, see Guben Xiaoshuo Banhua Tulu, vol. 8, fig. 485, from a 1621 edition of Zhaoyang Qushi [The Lascivious History of Han Empress Feiyan], and vol. 10, fig. 664, from Qishi’er Chao Renwu Yanyi, published about the end of the Ming. Cahill, “Where Did the Nymph Hang?” fig. 1. Ellen J. Laing, “Erotic Themes and Romantic Heroines Depicted by Ch’iu Ying.” The painting is a handscroll by Qiu Ying in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Translation by Robert H. van Gulik, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur, pp. 4–6. Cao Xueqin (ca. 1717–63), Honglou Meng, translated by David Hawkes as The Story of the Stone. I am grateful to Charles Mason and Andrea Goldman for bringing these mentions of paintings in Honglou Meng to my attention. For the passages discussed here, see vol. 1, p. 127 of the Hawkes trans. (Qin Shi), vol. 1, p. 377 (Cousin Chen), vol. 2, p. 318 (Baoyu), and vol. 2, p. 504 (Grandmother Jia). Hawkes, trans., The Story of the Stone, vol. 1, pp. 127–50. For this well-known passage in Guo Xi’s essay, see Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds., Early Chinese Texts on Painting, pp. 150–51. A brief discussion of this and other capacities of landscape painting is in James Cahill, Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting, pp. 63–66, “The Functions of Early Landscape Painting.” Hawkes, trans., The Story of the Stone, vol. 2, p. 292. Hawkes, trans., The Story of the Stone, vol. 1, p. 377. It is worth noting, in view of the emphasis of some recent Honglou Meng commentators on Baoyu’s “bisexuality,” that his response to this painting—and, we can assume, to the one hanging in his own bedroom—is distinctively male. See Louise P. Edwards, Men and Women in Qing China, pp. 33–49, esp. p. 39, where Edwards cites evidence that “the decor [of Baoyu’s bedroom] is feminine and the feel is feminine.” How the same figure would look if executed in traditional Chinese brushline and style, with a loss of the Metropolitan Museum picture’s illusionism but, by traditional Chinese criteria, a corresponding gain in quality, can be seen in a version by Kang Tao, identified there as the immortal Magu; see Tumu, vol. 12, hu 7–0545 (collection of Duo Yun Xuan, Shanghai). More or less the same figure was painted several times by Huang Shen; see, for one, Tumu, vol. 16, ji 1–210, also identified as Magu (collection of Jilin Provincial Museum). Male sojourning along with the problems it raised for wives and families left behind, a phenomenon especially widespread in the late Ming–early Qing period, is discussed by Susan Mann in her essay “Women, Families, and Gender Relations,” pp. 456–63. Paul S. Ropp, “Love, Literacy, and Laments,” p. 119. The painting in its present state shows evidence of having been cut down and worked over: a round window in upper right, seen in the complete version, has been expunged, and traces of the removal of parts of furniture, etc., are visible, especially on the left margin. I am grateful to Robert Mowry for confirming and adding to my own observations on the state of the painting. It was published in Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 1 (1912): 58, with a partial translation of the inscriptions on p. 64. It was at that time owned by the dealer Mme. Langweil. Its present ownership is unknown to me.

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42. The published article is Robert Maeda, “The Portrait of a Woman of the Late Ming–Early Ch’ing Period: Madame Ho-tung.” I should say in defense of Maeda that at the time he wrote it, I was as fooled by the deception as he was. 43. A study of this group is Cahill, “A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period.” 44. Late in the preparation of this book I learned, through the kindness of Cary Y. Liu, Curator of Asian Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, that this painting is one of a pair. The other represents a woman having her hair done by a maid in a garden, while gazing at a cat and a rabbit. This second painting is inscribed with a poem, but with no indication of author or artist. The sexual symbolism of peonies in full bloom is noted by Stephen H. West and Wilt Idema in their translation of Wang Shifu, The Moon and The Zither: The Story of the Western Wing, p. 143: “the red peony has especially come to symbolize the vagina in full flush of engorgement.” 45. Inscriptions on some figure paintings by Chen Hongshou are unusual in naming the assistants who added coloring and filled in designs; see Cahill, The Painter’s Practice, pp. 109–10. We can assume a similar, but unacknowledged, use of assistants for these tasks in much other meticulous-style figure painting. 46. Several partial copies of this work exist, all on paper, all less successful because they leave out crucial elements of the pictorial complex, so that there can be no question about priority. A copy by Kang Tao dated 1746 is in Christie’s New York auction, March 18, 1997, no. 112; also Duo Yun Xuan, Shanghai, November 23, 1997, no. 912. Another by Luo Ping dated 1781 is in the Lin Po-shou collection, Taipei; see Lanqian Shanguan Shuhua (Tokyo: Nigen­ sha, 1976), no. 29; also Junfang Pu, p. 75. These could be legitimate copies by the later artists; Luo Ping has appropriated the image for an imaginary portrait of the fifth-century courtesan Su Xiaoxiao. A relatively close copy, lacking only the rabbits, was offered at auction by Sotheby’s London, May 13. 1988, no. 106. None of these contains the full thematic program that conveys the moving message in the original. 47. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, pt. 1, chap. 6. 48. Another is the work by Hua Xu; see chapter 2, n. 6. 49. The gesture can be seen in two works by Qiu Ying: the Nymph of the Luo River handscroll that is the main subject of Ellen Laing’s article “Erotic Themes and Romantic Heroines,” and the hanging scroll in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in which the beauty gazes out over a river from an upstairs room (see Osvald Sirén, Chinese Painting, vol. 6, pl. 240). 50. The full title is China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata. Kircher writes that the picture is a copy from a Chinese painting sent to him by the Jesuits, but it is hard to imagine any close Chinese original for it. It is one of a pair. In the other, the woman holds a bird on a perch; a misunderstood qin (zither) is on the table beside her, a small sculpture of a Buddha hangs on the wall, and a tall vase holding flowering branches is decorated with designs that appear to be based more on Japanese than on Chinese models. 51. See Cahill, “Where Did the Nymph Hang?” figs. 3 and 4. 52. Another meiren painting in which the woman is reading a book of boudoir poetry is in the Freer Gallery of Art, reg. no. 19.155, unpublished; the poems in the book have been identified by Stephen Allee of the gallery’s curatorial staff. 53. Rouzer, “Watching the Voyeurs,” p. 19. 54. Cahill, “The Emperor’s Erotica,” fig. 22. 55. For example, by Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty, pp. 119–23 and passim. 56. Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image, p. 30. 57. My facetious account of the event implies no criticism of the then-curator, Stephen Little, to whom I am indebted for bringing the work to my attention.

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58. Another painting of a very similar subject has appeared more recently in the Bertholet collection, so close in style and corresponding in so many features that we can see it as a product of the same studio, possibly the same artist. Here the woman sits on a bamboo bench beside a large bronze bathtub, holding her hands within the transparent robe, about to take it off and enter the bath but pausing for a contemplative moment. See Le Palais du prin­ temps, pp. 196–97. 59. Derk Bodde, Chinese Thought, Society, and Science, p. 281. 60. Mark Elvin, “Tales of Shen and Xin,” p. 213. 61. Robert van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints, vol. 1 of the reprint, p. 163. In his preface to the same book (p. ii), van Gulik acknowledges that “Chinese painters did, when necessary, draw from the living model.” 62. On these fabrications, see Cahill, “Judge Dee and the Vanishing Ming Erotic Colour Prints.” 63. John Hay, “The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?” 64. Henry Charles Sirr, China and the Chinese: Their Religion, Character, Customs, and Manu­ factures: The Evils Arising from the Opium Trade: with a Glance at Our Religious, Moral, Political, and Commercial Intercourse with the Country (London: W. S. Orr & Co., 1849; repr. Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 324–25, and vol. 2, p. 43. I am grate­ ful to Charles Mason for bringing this reference to my attention. 65. Li Yu, The Carnal Prayer Mat, p. 45. 66. McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, p. 143. The story is Tao Hua Ying. 67. I know very well the response this statement will arouse among enthusiasts for nineteenthcentury meiren hua and could write the riposte myself, even while disagreeing with it. There are, I will quickly grant, some exceptions, works of high quality and interest from this late period. I believe nonetheless that the appraisal made here is basically correct. 68. See Qingdai Gongting A, pls. 135–51, for a series of court paintings, ranging in date from late Qianlong through the nineteenth century, that will support this judgment.



Conclusion 1. For a fuller presentation of this argument, see on my Web site, jamescahill.info, CLP 31, a discussant paper I presented at the symposium “Visual Dimensions of Chinese Culture” held at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey, March 26, 1999. My remarks were not intended as specific criticisms of the two paper-givers in that session, both excellent scholars, but as general observations. 2. Evidence for this unhealthy trend is given, and an argument against it advanced, in my paper “Visual, Verbal, and Global (?): Some Observations on Chinese Painting Studies,” delivered at a University of Maryland symposium “Chinese Painting Studies in Postwar America” in November 2005, available on my Web site, jamescahill.info, as CLP 176. Also to the point, for those who wish to read more on these issues, is CLP 178, my concluding talk in the April 2007 Berkeley symposium “Returning to the Shore.”

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ILLUSTR ATIONS

Information on the frontispiece and the chapter opening details appears on the copyright page. 1.1 Li Rihua, Rivers and Mountains in My Dream, dated 1625, sections 1 and 2 of a handscroll 7 1.2 Anonymous (late Ming or early Qing period), A Family Celebrating New Year’s, horizontal painting 8 1.3 Gu Jianlong, leaf 45 from album Sketches after the Old Masters (mogu fenben)

10

1.4 Gu Jianlong or close follower, Emperor Xuanzong Spies on Yang Guifei Bathing, hanging scroll 11 1.5 Wang Shimin, landscape in the manner of Huang Gongwang, dated 1651, hanging scroll 11 1.6 Wang Qiao, A Woman at Her Dressing Table, dated 1657, hanging scroll

24

2.1 Hua Xuan, Eight Beauties on the Balcony of a Brothel, dated 1736, large panel painting 33 2.2 Yin Shi, Woman Waiting at Weiqi Board (detail), dated 1745, small hanging scroll 2.3 Xu Mei, Family Scene, leaf from album of eight erotic scenes

36

2.4 Yu Zhiding, Searching for Blossoming Plum in the Western Suburbs (portrait of the Manchu official Dali), dated 1709, hanging scroll 38 2.5 Yuan Jiang, Palace at Evening, after Guo Zhongshu, dated 1693, hanging scroll 2.6 Zhang Zhen, Lady at Window, with Two Cats, hanging scroll

43

2.7 Zhang Weibang et al., Palace Ladies in a Waterside Pavilion, hanging scroll

253

43

41

34

2.8 Anonymous (possibly Zhang Zhen or Zhang Weibang, with others), The Yongzheng Emperor Enjoying Pleasures (Yongzheng xingle tu), hanging scroll 45 2.9 Anonymous (possibly Zhang Zhen or Zhang Weibang, with others), panel from the screen Twelve Beauties in Palace Interiors (formerly mistakenly titled Twelve Consorts of the Yongzheng Emperor) 49 2.10 Anonymous, another panel from the same screen as figure 2.9

49

2.11 Jin Tingbiao, perhaps with Lang Shining, The Qianlong Emperor Enjoying Himself, horizontal painting 51 2.12 Denis Attiret, Woman Lifting a Curtain to Look out from a Room, drawing 2.13 Denis Attiret, Woman Seated at a Table Writing, drawing

52

52

2.14 Lang Shining (Giuseppe Castiglione), Stag and Doe in an Autumn Forest, hanging scroll 54 2.15 Jin Tingbiao, possibly with Lang Shining, The Qianlong Emperor and a Consort, one of pair of hanging scrolls 56 2.16 Jin Tingbiao, possibly with Lang Shining, The Qianlong Emperor and a Consort, other of pair of hanging scrolls 56 2.17 Jin Tingbiao, Lady Putting Flowers in Her Hair, hanging scroll 2.18 Jin Tingbiao, Lady Feng Confronting the Bear, hanging scroll

58 58

2.19 Jiao Bingzhen, Su Wu Gazing at Geese, small hanging scroll 61 2.20 Leng Mei, The Immortal Magu and Attendant, hanging scroll

61

2.21 Chen Mei, Scholar and Attendants on Woodland Path, hanging scroll mounted on panel 64 3.1 Suzhou woodblock print, perhaps a New Year’s picture, dated 1743

72

3.2 Suzhou woodblock print, Pleasures in a Pavilion by a Lotus Pond 72 3.3 Shen Cang, Autumn Thoughts on a Stream Bridge, album leaf

75

3.4 Daocun (Shizhuang), leaf from album Eight Scenes of Mount Tiantai, dated 1706 75 3.5 Daocun (Shizhuang), another leaf from the same album as figure 3.4

75

3.6 Shen Quan, Ox Drinking from a Stream, leaf from album Flowers, Birds, and Animals, after Song Masters, dated 1740 76 3.7 After Jiao Bingzhen, leaf from Gengzhi Tu, woodblock print

79

3.8 After Jiao Bingzhen, another leaf from Gengzhi Tu (as figure 3.7)

79

3.9 Jiao Bingzhen, leaf from album of Palace Ladies 79 3.10 Jiao Bingzhen, another leaf from the same album as figure 3.9

79

3.11 Jan and Jerome Wierix, engraved illustration to Nadal, Evangelicae historiae imagines (1593–94) 81 3.12 Jan and Jerome Wierix, another illustration from the same volume as 3.11 3.13 Leng Mei, Beautiful Woman at Dressing Table, with Attendant

81

83

3.14 Gerard Dou, Young Woman at Her Dressing Table, dated 1667, easel painting

83

3.15 Chen Mei, leaf from album Yueman Qingyu (Occupations of the Months), dated 1738 85 3.16 Chen Mei, another leaf from the same album as figure 3.15 85

254

3.17 Anonymous (perhaps late seventeenth century), The Whipping, hanging scroll 3.18 Cui Zizhong, Sweeping the Elephant, detail from hanging scroll

87

3.19 Jiao Bingzhen, Woman Arranging Flowers in a Bronze Pot, hanging scroll 3.20 Cui Hui, Imaginary Portrait of Li Qingzhao, hanging scroll 3.21 Cui Hui, Lady in a Garden Pavilion, hanging scroll

87

89

91

93

3.22 Cui Hui, Imaginary Portrait of Xiaoqing, hanging scroll

93

3.23 Possibly Wang Chengpei, Lady Waiting in a Doorway, hanging scroll

96

4.1 Anonymous (thirteenth or fourteenth century), Palace Women and Children Celebrating the New Year, hanging scroll mounted on panel 102 4.2 Anonymous, Palace Women and Children Celebrating the New Year (detail of figure 4.1) 102 4.3 Anonymous (late Ming or early Qing period), A Family Celebrating New Year’s (detail of figure 1.2) 103 4.4 Yan Yi, A Family Celebrating New Year’s, hanging scroll

105

4.5 Anonymous (mid-eighteenth century; interpolated signature of Leng Mei), A Family Celebrating New Year’s, hanging scroll 105 4.6 Anonymous, A Family Celebrating New Year’s (detail of figure 4.5)

105

4.7 Chen Mei, Lang Shining, et al., Qianlong and His Family Celebrating New Year’s, dated 1738, hanging scroll 107 4.8 Possibly Chen Mei, Lang Shining, et al., but unsigned, Qianlong and His Family Celebrating New Year’s, hanging scroll 107 4.9 Leng Mei or a close follower, The Lantern Festival (The Garden of Perfect Celebration), hanging scroll 109 4.10 Zhao Wei, The Three Stars, hanging scroll

111

4.11 Xie Sui, A Gentleman Celebrating His Birthday, hanging scroll

111

4.12 Leng Mei, A Gentlewoman Celebrating Her Birthday, hanging scroll 4.13 Leng Mei, A Happy Couple and Their Family, hanging scroll

113

113

4.14 Gu Jianlong, Wang Shimin and His Family at Home, handscroll

114

4.15 Gu Jianlong or follower, A Boy in His Study, possibly a fragment of a larger painting

116

4.16 Anonymous (eighteenth century), A Landlord-Official Meeting Petitioners on His Estate, album leaf 117 4.17 Anonymous (eighteenth century), Group Portrait: A Family outside Their House, hanging scroll 119 4.18 Zhang Yin, A Family in Their Villa, detail of handscroll

120

4.19 Zhang Yin, A Family in Their Villa, another detail of same handscroll as figure 4.18

121

4.20 Anonymous (third quarter of the eighteenth century), Couple and Child in a Garden, album leaf 122 4.21 Anonymous, Couple Listening to a Blind Pipa Player, another leaf from the same album as figure 4.20 122 4.22 Anonymous, Painting Fans, another leaf from the same album as figure 4.20

123

4.23 Anonymous, A Man and His Concubines in a Garden, another leaf from the same album as figure 4.20 123

255

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

4.24 Anonymous (third quarter of the eighteenth century; false seal of Qiu Ying), A Man and His Concubines in a Garden Pavilion, large album leaf 124 4.25 Probably Gu Jianlong (old attribution to Qiu Ying), Women Playing Cards

126

4.26 Anonymous (mid-seventeenth century, old attribution to Qiu Ying), Two Women with Books and Scrolls, leaf from album of Scenes of Women in Domestic Settings 128 4.27 Anonymous, Woman in a Room, Another Outside, another leaf from the same album as figure 4.26 128 4.28 Anonymous, Two Women Looking through a Moon Window, another leaf from the same album as figure 4.26 129 4.29 Anonymous (mid- or later eighteenth century), Guanyin on a Lotus Leaf, hanging scroll 130 4.30 Zhang Jing, Encounter on a Mountain Path, album leaf mounted in handscroll

133

4.31 Anonymous (early Qing, perhaps late seventeenth century), A Monster-Revealing Mirror, probably a large album leaf 133 4.32 Possibly Cui Hui (old attribution to Tang Yin), perhaps a scene from The Story of the Western Wing 135 4.33 After Qiu Ying, scene from The Story of the Western Wing, album leaf

135

4.34 Anonymous (seventeenth century; attributed to Qiu Ying, with his seals), scene from The Story of the Western Wing, album leaf 135 4.35 Fan Xueyi, Painting the Eyebrows, album leaf

137

4.36 Fan Xueyi, The Lady of Qin Playing the Flute, another leaf from the same album as figure 4.35 137 4.37 Probably Gu Jianlong, Ximen Qing Foolishly Presents His New Wife, Mistress Ping, to His Worthless and Bibulous Guests, illustration to Jin Ping Mei, album leaf 139 4.38 Probably Gu Jianlong, Ximen Qing’s Brocade Shop, illustration to Jin Ping Mei

139

4.39 Xu Yang, The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, scroll 6: Entering Suzhou along the Grand Canal, section of a handscroll 141 4.40 Xu Yang, The Puji Bridge, from The Flourishing City (panorama of Suzhou), section of a handscroll 141 4.41 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, dated 1768, section of a handscroll

142

4.42 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, dated 1768, another section of the same handscroll as figure 4.41 142 4.43 Xu Yang, The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, scroll 6: Entering Suzhou along the Grand Canal, another section of the same handscroll as figure 4.39 142 4.44 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 143 4.45 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 144 4.46 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 145 4.47 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 145 4.48 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 145

256

4.49 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 146 4.50 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 146 4.51 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 147 4.52 Anonymous, Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill, detail from the same handscroll as figure 4.41 147 5.1 Anonymous (mid- or later eighteenth century), scene from The Story of the Western Wing, hanging scroll mounted as a panel 151 5.2 Hua Xuan, Eight Beauties on the Balcony of a Brothel, detail of figure 2.1

153

5.3 Anonymous (perhaps late eighteenth century), Women in a Brothel, hanging scroll 155 5.4 Probably Gu Jianlong, Beggar Ying Invites Cinnamon to Drink in the Willow Garden of Mother Li, illustration to Jin Ping Mei, album leaf 155 5.5 Anonymous (mid- or later eighteenth century; false inscription and signature of Tang Yin), Woman in a Brothel Presented to a Guest, hanging scroll 156 5.6 Probably Gu Jianlong, Li Qiao’er and Three Others in a Bordello, leaf from the same series of illustrations to Jin Ping Mei as figure 5.4 160 5.7 Anonymous (mid-eighteenth century), Girl Bringing a Jar of Wine, hanging scroll 164 5.8 Anonymous, perhaps a follower of Leng Mei, Beautiful Woman in Her Boudoir (falsely titled Portrait of Mme. Hedong), hanging scroll 169 5.9 Anonymous, perhaps a follower of Leng Mei, Beautiful Woman in Her Boudoir, complete version of same composition as figure 5.8 169 5.10 Anonymous (mid-seventeenth century), Scholar and Beauty with Peonies and Rabbits, hanging scroll 171 5.11 Possibly Gu Jianlong or a close follower, A Woman Washing Her Hands, with Her Maid 173 5.12 Anonymous (early eighteenth century), Beauty Seated on a Rock in a Garden, Holding a Fan, hanging scroll (cut down) 173 5.13 Anonymous, follower of Leng Mei (false seals of Leng Mei), Woman Resting from Reading, hanging scroll 174 5.14 Huang Shifu, A Fairy Beauty at Quiet Rest, dated 1640, hanging scroll

177

5.15 Gu Jianlong, Beautiful Woman with Rocks, Tree, and Bamboo, dated 1683, hanging scroll 179 5.16 Yu Zhiding, Woman in a Weed-Grown Garden Gazing at Rabbits, hanging scroll

181

5.17 Probably Yu Zhiding (old attribution to Zhou Wenju, currently catalogued as “Anonymous Ming”), Woman Reading in a Garden, hanging scroll 181 5.18 Yu Zhiding, Woman at a Weiqi Board, dated 1697, hanging scroll

183

5.19 Anonymous, Chinese Woman in an Interior, with a Bird, engraved illustration to Athanasius Kircher, China Monumentis . . . illustrata (1667) 184 5.20 Leng Mei, Beautiful Woman in an Interior, with a Dog, dated 1724, hanging scroll 5.21 Gu Jianlong, Beauty in Erotic Reverie

257

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

189

186

5.22 Anonymous (eighteenth century; spurious signature of Leng Mei), Woman Fantasizing, Seen through a Window, hanging scroll 189 5.23 Anonymous (eighteenth century), Beauty about to Bathe, hanging scroll 5.24 After Cui Hui, Passing the Summer by a Lotus Pond, hanging scroll

190

193

5.25 Probably Gu Jianlong or a close follower, Emperor Xuanzong Spies on Yang Guifei Bathing, detail of figure 1.4 195 5.26 Gu Jianlong (seals of the artist), Couple in the Bath, album leaf

258

195

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. academic painting, 17, 69, 77, 78, 88, 104, 153–54; banality of, 95; figural, 26, 65; See also Imperial Painting Academy Alpers, Svetlana, 80 Anhui Province, 35, 74, 97, 132 arhats (Buddhist holy men), 35, 86 Attiret, Denis, 51–53; Woman Lifting a Curtain to Look out from a Room, 52; Woman Seated at a Table Writing, 52 Auden, W. H., 124–25 Ayers, John, 81–82 Bada Shanren, 68 baimiao technique, 35 Baxandall, Michael, 68 Beautiful Woman in Her Boudoir (anonymous; falsely inscribed as self-portrait of Ma Shouzhen), 168, 169 Beauty about to Bathe (anonymous), 190, 191 Beauty Seated on a Rock in a Garden, Holding a Fan (anonymous), 172, 173

Beijing, 6, 9, 36, 38, 42, 50, 106, 182, 232n58; cityscapes of, 220n16; figure painting in, 28, 29, 60, 65, 85–87, 90; Imperial Household Department in, 62; meiren painting in, 168, 172; Ministry of Rites in, 6; painting academy in, see Imperial Painting Academy; Westernizing elements in, 73, 77, 85 Berlin Museum, 73 Bertholet, Ferdinand M., 237n58 Bi Wan, 233n64 Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), 52 Birrell, Anne, 234n12 birthday pictures, 3, 13, 14, 29, 55, 63, 100–101, 108, 110–12, 114, 140 Bo Juyi, Pipa Xing, 132 Board of Military Affairs, 97 Bodde, Dirk, 191 Boney, Alice, 229n1 Boxer Rebellion, 53 Braun, Georg, Civitatis orbis terrarum, 70–71

259

British Museum (London), 36, 65, 118, 158, 172, 185 Buck, Pearl S., The Good Earth, 152–53 Buddhism, 6, 12, 77, 86, 94, 103, 131, 150, 215n49 caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty romance), 47, 56, 150, 170 Cao Xiuxian, 140 Cao Xueqin, 164; The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng), 80, 144, 161, 165 Cass, Victoria, 124–25, 138, 150, 233n2 Castiglione, Giuseppe, see Lang Shining Chan Buddhism (Zen Buddhism), 12, 154 Changchun Yuan (Garden of Prolonging Spring), 38, 59, 87, 221n20 Changshu, 35 Chen Heng, 63 Chen Hongshou, 13, 110, 236n45 Chen Mei, 60, 62–63, 107, 224n75; Landscape with Bats, 62; Qianlong and

Chen Mei (continued) His Family Celebrating New Year’s, 106–7, 107; Scholar and Attendants on Woodland Path, 64; Yuemen Qingyu (Occupations of the Months), 84, 84 Chen Tong, 62, 63 Cheng Liang, 112 Chengguan Ge, 52 Chinese Woman in an Interior, with a Bird (anonymous), 184, 184 Chino, Kaori, 218n44 Christianity, 68, 73, 85. See also Jesuits chungong hua (spring palace pictures), 5 cityscapes, 29, 138–48 Close to Midnight (poetry book), 186 Clunas, Craig, 15 concubines, 23, 57, 94, 123, 127, 150, 154, 157, 176; in family occasion paintings, 101, 104, 111; of literati, 125; of Manchu emperors, 32, 39, 40, 53, 55; Ming era, 20 Confucianism, 3, 20, 22, 44, 57, 123, 124, 150, 162, 163, 192, 216n10 Couple and Child in a Garden (anonymous), 122 Couple Listening to a Blind Pipa Player (anonymous), 122 courtesans, 25, 124, 149–59, 176; of Jiang nan, 42, 47, 50–51; Ming era, 20, 23, 32; upper-class, 161 Cui Hui, 88, 90, 106, 134, 168, 184, 228n52; Imaginary Portrait of Li Qingzhao, 90, 91, 92, 125; Imaginary Portrait of Xiaoqing, 92, 93, 94, 125; Lady in a Garden Pavilion, 92, 93; Passing the Summer by a Lotus Pond, 192, 193 Cui Zizhong, 60, 86, 95, 132; Sweeping the Elephant, 87 Dali (Manchu official), 38 Dangtu, 132 Daocun (Shizhuang), 74, 226n19; Eight Scenes of Mount Tiantai, 74 Daoism, 6, 60, 110, 131, 132 Deng Chun, 101 Dong Qichang, 8, 11, 12, 17, 20–22, 26, 99, 216n10 Dong Xiaowan, 125

Dou, Gerard, 82; Young Woman at her Dressing Table, 83 Du Jin, 13, 78, 99 Dutch painting, 18, 29, 78, 80, 227n37 Eccentric Masters of Yangzhou, 17, 39– 40, 74, 99–100 Eight Masters of Jinling, 73 Elvin, Mark, 191 Eminent Women of the Past (anonymous), 136 erotic art, 4, 5, 20–23, 109, 127; albums of, 5, 9, 22, 23, 28, 33, 36, 36–37, 59, 100, 120, 122–23, 123, 127–29, 128, 129, 132, 137; animal imagery in, 55; bare feet in, 131; courtesan culture and, 125; domestic scenes as, 120, 122, 136; Han Chinese women in, 53; in Jiangnan cities, 59; nudes in, 192–94, 195, 196; scale of intensity of, 37, 46; Westernizing elements in, 42, 82, 97. See also meiren hua Fa Ruozhen, 85 Family Celebrating New Year’s, A: (anonymous), 7, 8, 103, 103, 104, 105; (Yan Yi), 104, 105 Fan Qi, 73, 95 Fan Xueyi, 136; Painting the Eyebrows, 137; The Lady of Qin Playing the Flute, 136, 137 Fang Xiaowei, 132 Faure, Bernard, 12, 216n16 Fei Danxu, 196 fenben (sketches), 9, 10, 12, 100 Feng, Lady, 57 Fifty-three Images of Guanyin (anonymous), 131 figure painting, 57, 74, 97, 127; academicstyle, 65; for family occasions, 101–13; Ming, 21; northern school of, 29, 60, 85–95, 134, 157, 168, 187 Five Dynasties, 18 Flemish painting, 18, 29, 80 Forbidden City, 44, 47, 49, 87, 106, 232n58 Four Wangs, 8, 17 Franklin, Andrew, 233n67 Freer, Charles Lang, 26

260

Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), 26, 63, 86, 134, 224n75 French painting, nineteenth-century, 68, 73, 95 Frye, Northrop, 19 Fu Derong, 136 Fujian Province, 77 fu¯zoku’ga (genre painting), 5 Gai Qi, 196 Gao Cen, 73 Gao Qipei, 228n52 Gao Shiqi, 225n8 Ge Hong, 16 Gherardini, Giovanni, 225n8 Girl Bringing a Jar of Wine (anonymous), 164 Goldman, Andrea, 176 Gong Xian, 73, 74, 95, 226n16 Group Portrait: A Family Outside Their House (anonymous), 119 Gu Hongzhong, Han Xizai’s Night Revels, 18 Gu Jianlong, 8–12, 15, 35–36, 110, 137, 220n14, 229n1; erotic albums of, 23, 37, 125; fenben albums of, 9, 10, 12, 100; foreign devices adopted by, 82; painting-within-a-painting device of, 160, 161; seal of, 65; in Suzhou pian tradition, 18 —works: Beautiful Woman with Rocks, Tree, and Bamboo, 157, 176, 178, 179, 180; Beauty in Erotic Reverie, 187–88, 188; A Boy in His Study, 115, 116; Couple in the Bath, 189, 194, 195; Emperor Xuanzong Spies on Yang Guifei Bathing, 8, 9, 12, 11, 194, 195; Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) illustrations, 18, 59, 100, 137–38, 139, 154, 155, 160, 160; Sketches after the Old Masters, 9, 10; Wang Shimin and His Family at Home, 11, 114–16, 115; A Woman Washing Her Hands, with Her Maid, 170, 173; Women Playing Cards, 125, 126 Gu Kaizhi, 225n8 Gu Luo, 196 Guanyin on a Lotus Leaf (anonymous), 129, 130, 131, 168

guixiu (gentry women), 23, 25, 125, 165, 192, Gulik, R. H. van, 15 Guo Xi, 163 Guochao Yuanhu Lu (Hu Jing), 63 gushi (historical episodes), 136 Han Chinese, 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 88, 162, 229n1; Manchu relations with, 28, 42, 44, 46–48, 50, 55, 222n37 Hangzhou, 13, 34–35, 40, 63, 90, 94 Harunobu, 144 Hawkes, David, 162 Hay, John, 191–92 Hearn, Maxwell, 139 historical scenes, paintings of, 4, 14, 15, 36, 136, 140 Hogenberg, Franz, Civitatis orbis terrarum, 70–71 Hokusai, 73 Hongli (Yongzheng’s fourth son), 62, 224n66 Hongniang (maid of Cui Yingying), 132, 134 Hongren, 68 Howard, David, 81–82 Hu Jing, 63 Hu Shih, 26–27 Hua Xuan, 219n6; Eight Beauties on the Balcony of a Brothel, 32–33, 33, 152– 54, 153, 159, 188; Lady Zhen Dressing Herself, 220n6 Hua Yan, 40, 34–35, 99 Huai’an, 226n19 Huang Gongwang, 11 Huang Shen, 235n37 Huang Shifu, A Fairy Beauty at a Quiet Rest, 176, 177, 180 Huang Yingshen, 77, 226n25 Huizhou region, 74 Huns, 60 hybrid-style paintings, 60, 63, 74, 78, 182 illusionism, 17–19, 57, 69–71, 76–78, 80, 84, 85, 97–98, 106, 156; of Eight Masters of Jinling, 73; in hybrid-style paintings, 60, 63, 74, 78; in Imperial Painting Academy, 59, 60; in meiren

painting, 49, 52–53, 57, 59, 82, 152, 162–66, 187, 194 Imperial Painting Academy (Beijing), 6, 53, 60, 62, 63, 94, 167, 168, 197; collaborative works by artists in, 106, 139; Jiangnan urban studio masters in, 31, 36, 42; Ming, 27, 76, 217n17, 226n22; pictures of women in, 46, 88, 185; Qianlong era, 121, 220n8, 222n46; seals of members of, 65; Song, 2, 16, 28, 39, 40, 74–76, 99, 101; Westernizing elements in, 19, 43, 69–71, 77, 84–86, 182; Yongzheng era, 44, 46; Zhang family in, 49, 59 Italian painting, 29, 71, 83, 84, 95 James, Henry, 20 Japan, 1, 13, 25, 27, 71, 189; Daruma dolls from, 146; Edo period, 5; geishas’ status in, 149; painting in, 95, 148, 168; printmaking in, 68, 73, 84, 144, 152, 168, 176, 196, 227n41; Muromachi period, 218n44; Tosa school in, 218n44 Jesuits, 19, 29, 51, 55, 77, 79, 83, 184, 225n8, 226n24, 227n30 Ji Kaisheng, 48 Jiading, 35, 71, 73–74 Jiang Tingxi, 40 Jiangnan region, 28, 35, 57, 74, 85, 124, 149, 167; courtesan culture of, 42, 47, 50–51, 157; gardens of, 221n20; urban studio artists of, 17, 31, 35–37, 40, 88. See also Nanjing; Suzhou; Wuxi; Yangzhou Jiangsu Province, 9, 35, 40, 62, 140, 143, 220n8 Jiao Bingzhen, 63, 65, 77–78, 84, 86, 88–90, 223n60, 225n13, 228n50; Gengzhi Tu, 77, 78, 79, 132; Palace Ladies, 43, 46, 60, 78, 79, 88, 185; Su Wu Gazing at Geese, 60, 61; Woman Arranging Flowers in a Bronze Pot, 60, 88, 89, 92, 106, 157, 182, 185, 187 Jiaqing, 222n37 jiaqing tu (family auspicious pictures), 101 jiehua (“ruled-line” architectural rendering), 43

261

INDEX

Jifu, 32 Jin Dynasty, 31 Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), 59, 101, 137–38, 154, 155, 160, 160, 192 Jin Tingbiao, 35, 50, 53, 55, 59, 82, 223n54; Lady Feng Confronting the Bear, 57, 58; Lady Putting Flowers in Her Hair, 57, 58, 150, 157; The Qianlong Emperor and a Consort, 55–56, 56; The Qianlong Emperor Enjoying Himself, 51, 53; Yuejun Tu, 223n54 Johnson, David, 20–21 Juanqin Zhai (Lodge of Retiring from Hard Work), 223n53 Jurchens, 31, 55, 90 Kahn, Harold, 221n31 Kang Tao, 34–35, 60, 235n37 Kang-i Sun Chang, 158 Kangxi, 6, 17, 33, 85, 86, 136; court painters of, 9, 32, 35, 36, 42, 50, 132, 220n8 (see also specific artists); death of, 62; deer hunts of, 55; garden retreat of, 38, 221n20; Han Chinese consorts of, 46–47; portrait of, 229n1; sixtieth birthday celebration of, 37, 40; southern tours of, 35, 47–48, 50, 77, 139; Westernizing elements during reign of, 43, 69, 74, 77, 225n8 Khitan artists, 55 Kircher, Athanasius, China Monumenta . . . illustrata, 184, 184–85, 236n50 Ko, Dorothy, 22, 157–58, 218n34, 222n43, 231n39, 233n2 Kondo¯, Hidemi, 226n22 Korea, 90, 228n52 Kuhn, Annette, 188 Kuhn, Philip, 50–51 Kuncan, 68, 226n19 Lady Su Hui and Her Palindrome (anonymous), 136 Lady Wenji’s Return to Han (anonymous), 136 Laing, Ellen J., 161, 218n38 Lan Ying, 116

Landlord-Official Meeting Petitioners on His Estate, A (anonymous), 117 landscape painting, 4, 16–19, 23, 39, 97, 140; birds and animals in, 76; figures in, 62, 85–95; of literati, 6–7, 9–12, 14, 21, 22, 98, 136; Mi style, 98; Orthodox school of, 8, 10, 17, 37, 40, 70, 77, 88, 111, 196; Song, 19, 74, 94, 99, 163; Westernizing elements in, 63, 73, 74; Zhe school of, 26, 27, 217n17 Lang Shining (Giuseppe Castiglione), 19, 42–43, 50, 53, 55–56, 56, 59, 84, 107, 223n54, n55, 225n13; Qianlong and His Family Celebrating New Year’s, 106–7, 107; Stag and Doe in an Autumn Forest, 53, 54, 55; Yuejun Tu, 223n54 Langer, Suzanne K., 20, 127, 217n31 Lao, Mr., 140, 143 Leng Jian, 65 Leng Mei, 37, 46, 60, 90, 94, 158, 168, 169, 224n78; hybrid style of, 63; Jiao Bingzhen’s stylistic influence on, 84, 86; questionable attribution of works to, 104, 105, 111, 158, 172, 175, 175; studio established by, 65, 168 —works: Beautiful Woman at Dressing Table with Attendant, 53, 83; Beautiful Woman in an Interior, with a Dog, 63, 92, 128, 157, 176, 185–88, 186; A Gentlewoman Celebrating Her Birthday, 63, 112, 113; A Happy Couple and Their Family, 63, 112, 113; Illustrations to a Farmer Family’s Life, 116– 17; The Lantern Festival (The Garden of Perfect Celebration), 108, 109; The Immortal Magu and Attendant, 60, 61, 110; Nine Egrets, 63; Stories of Farmers, 63 Leng Quan, 65, 224n78 Li Dou, Yangzhou Huafang Lu, 159 Li Ping’er, 235n25 Li Qingzhao, 90, 91, 92, 125 Li Rihua, 6–7, 12, 216n10; Rivers and Moutains in My Dreams, 7, 7–8, 12 Li Shan, 40 Li Shida, 104 Li Shizhuo,228n52 Li Song, 229n7 Li, Wai-yee, 158

Li Yu, 20, 101; Roupu Tuan, 132, 194 Liao artists, 55 Liaoning Province, 90 Liaoyang, 90 literati, 1–6, 8–14, 16, 21–23, 36, 97, 100, 114, 124, 200; citiscapes by, 71; commodification of, 158; critics, 26– 27, 148; elite culture of, 37, 39, 69; landscape painting of, 6–7, 9–12, 14, 21, 22, 98, 136; Northern school of, 12–13; occasional paintings of, 101; scholar-beauty liaisons of courtesans and, 23, 125; thematic scope of, 99; traditional styles of, 88; writers, 22, 94; Yuan, 11 Liu Hualiang, 228n46 Liu Xiang, 162 Liu Yin (Liu Rushi), 56, 74, 168, 169, 172, 178, 180, 185, 214n37 Lowry, Kathryn, 22, 230n29 Lu Wei, 225n10 Luo Ping, 40, 42, 88, 99, 236n46 Ma Hezhi, 39 Ma Lin, 99 Ma Shouzhen, 32, 168, 169 Ma Yuan, 99 machi eshi ( Japanese urban picturemakers), 13 Man and His Concubines in a Garden, A (anonymous), 123 Manchus, 6, 17, 31–32, 37, 38, 49, 59, 87, 228n52; Han Chinese relations with, 28, 42, 44, 46–48, 50, 55, 222n37. See also Kangxi; Qianlong; Yongzheng Mann, Susan, 23, 157, 158, 235n38 Mao Xiang, 125 marriage pictures, 112 McLaren, Anne E., 230n33 McMahon, Keith, 150, 158, 196, 233n3 meiren hua (beautiful-woman paintings), 2, 3, 5, 15, 16, 21, 29, 57, 94, 104, 157– 72, 175–91; audience for, 152, 154, 159–67; in brothels, 138, 152; erotic intensity of, 129, 175–91; iconic conventions of, 131, 144; by Jiao Bingzhen, 60, 88–89, 92, 157, 182, 185, 187; mistaken for real women, 97, 159; nineteenth-century, 96–97; of nudes, 191–94; Tiger Hill shops selling, 140,

262

146; by urban studio masters, 32–35, 100, 101, 113; Westernizing elements in, 59, 63, 82, 157, 162, 163, 166, 170; by Zhang family, 42, 46, 48–49, 53 Meskill, John, 124, 125 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 139, 146, 233n66, 235n37 Meyer-Fong, Tobie, 233n1 Mi Fu, 101; Hua Shi, 101; Landscape in Mist and Rain, 163 Mi-style landscapes, 98 Ming Dynasty, 3, 4, 14, 18, 78, 98, 137, 152, 191, 230n24, 235n38; courtesan culture of, 29, 32, 150, 157, 158; figure masters of, 60, 86; Imperial Painting Academy of, 27, 76, 217n17, 226n22; literature of, 25, 59, 125; Manchu invasion and, 31; meiren painting of, 161– 62, 167, 176; misattribution of paintings to, 180, 231n43; narrative albums of, 134; New Year’s paintings of, 101, 104, 229n7; portraits of emperors of, 36; rejection of innovation during, 18, 19; scholar-beauty theme during, 23, 47, 170; socioeconomic changes during, 6, 16, 123, 124; studio masters of, 13, 128; Suzhou pian of, 8, 21, 22; versatility of artists of, 99; Westernizing elements during, 19, 67–71, 77, 95, 225n10; Zhe school of, 26, 27 mogu fenben (study sketches), 9, 100 Mongols, 46 Monster-Revealing Mirror, A (anonymous), 132 Moss, Paul, 221n27 Mu, Duke of Qin, 136 Murasaki, Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, 178 Murck, Alfreda, 221n21 Murray, Julia, 231n45 Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 111, 170 Nadal, Jerome, 73; Evangelicae historiae imagines, 80, 80 Nagasaki, 76 Nanga painting, 95 Nanjing, 19, 36, 74, 132, 165; Jesuit mission in, 226n24; urban studio masters of, 6, 13, 35; Westernizing influences on painting in, 70, 71, 73, 77

narrative paintings, 14, 15, 18, 20, 29, 86, 92, 120, 131–38 National Palace Museum (Taipei), 6, 50, 106, 180 New Year’s pictures, 3, 8, 12, 21, 27, 29, 63, 94, 101–11, 147, 165, 168 Ni Zan, 98, 99, 136, 146 nianhua. See New Year’s pictures Nie Chongzheng, 53, 60, 224n66, n78, 226n25 Nongyu, 136 Northern school: art-historical, 9–13, 19, 216n16; of figure painting (hypothetical), 85–95, 108 Nymph of the Luo River, The (anonymous) 160, 161, 165 Orthodox school of landscape, 8, 10, 17, 37, 40, 70, 77, 88, 111, 196 Owen, Stephen, 233n2 Painting Fans (anonymous), 123 Palace Museum (Beijing), 6, 50, 90, 106, 221n22, 223n53 Palace Women and Children Celebrating the New Year (anonymous), 102 perspective, 35, 81; Italian system of, 80, 83, 95; linear, 29, 43, 71, 78, 80, 84 Pope, John, 63 Portuguese, trade with, 71 Preetorius, Emil, 154 Princeton University Art Museum, 170 Pu Songling, 158; Liaozhai Zhiyi, 132 Qian Qianyi, 36, 56, 100, 318n37 Qianlong, 6, 17, 29, 62, 85, 97, 121, 158, 197, 222n46, 223n55; ascent to throne of, 40, 50; consorts of, 56, 56–57, 222n47; court painters of, 32, 35, 49, 65, 94–95 (see also specific artists); deer hunts of, 55, 223n57; garden retreat of, 42, 44, 51–52, 59, 221n31; paintings depicting, 50, 51, 53, 56, 56, 106–7, 107; poems by, 47, 227n42; southern tours of, 35, 50–51, 139; Westernizing elements during reign of, 69, 226n25 Qianlong Albums Master, 121–23 Qin Nü, the Lady of Qin, 136, 137

Qingming Festival on the River (anonymous), 62, 138 Qingming Shanghe Tu (Spring Festival on the River) (collaborative work), 62, 138; copies of, 147 Qiu Ying, 13, 14, 18, 21, 134, 137, 161, 170; false attributions to, 8, 22–23, 103–4, 127, 134, 136, 138, 147, 157, 218n38, 230n28; figure painting of, 21–22, 78; thematic variety of, 99, 100 Qiu Zhu, 21–22, 170 Quanzhou, 71 Rawski, Evelyn, 50 Ren Xiong, 197 Ren Yi (Ren Bonian), 197 Renoir, Auguste, 185 Ropp, Paul, 149, 166 Rouzer, Paul, 157, 187 Roy, David, 101 Rubens, Peter Paul, 185 Sanhan, 90, 228n52 Scenes of Women in Domestic Settings (anonymous), 128 Schafer, Edward, 233n2 Scholar and Beauty with Peonies and Rabbits (anonymous), 170, 171, 178 Sesshu¯ , 218n44 Shan Guoqiang, 47, 222n37 Shandong Province, 40, 60, 78, 85, 168 Shanghai, 6, 73, 154, 196 Shanghai School masters, 197 Shaoxing, 32, 110 She Ch’eng, 220n14 Shen Cang, 73–74; Autumn Thoughts on a Stream Bridge, 73, 74 Shen Quan (Shen Nanpin), 76, 226n22; Ox Drinking from a Stream, 76 Shen Shigeng, 22 Shen Zhou, 99 Shenliu Dushu Tang (Study Deep within Willows), 48–49, 59 Shi Pangzi, 32, 101, 165 Shijing (Book of Odes), 53 shinu hua (paintings of gentlewomen), 2, 167 Shitao, 40, 68 Shu¯ bun, 218n44 Shunzhi, 48

263

INDEX

Silk Road, 106 Sirr, Henry Charles, 192 Song Dynasty, 3, 14–16, 19, 88, 90, 127, 148, 197, 226n22, 231n45; copies and forgeries of paintings of, 18, 21; handscrolls of, 138; Imperial Painting Academy of, 2, 16, 28, 39, 40, 74–76, 99, 101; landscape painting in, 26, 94, 163; misattribution of works to, 26, 63; modes of dress in, 46 Song jiang, 21, 22, 62, 63, 225n10 Southern school of painting, 9, 12 Spring Pleasures at Tiger Hill (anonymous), 140 Steen, Jan, A Woman at Her Toilet, 227n28 Story of the Western Wing, The (Xixiang Ji) (anonymous), 94, 108–9, 132, 134, 134, 147, 150, 150, 152, 157, 168, 170 Strehlneek, E. H., 154, 219n3, 234n10 Stuart, Jan, 234n4 Su Dingyuan, 140, 143 Su Dingyuan’s Visit to Tiger Hill (anonymous), 142–46 Su Shi (Su Dongpo), 1 Su Wu, 60, 61 Su Xiaoxiao, 236n46 Sui Yangdi, 48 Suzhou, 21–23, 25, 33, 59, 120, 147, 218n38; copies and forgeries produced in, 100, 103, 127, 134; erotic culture of, 47; Gu Jianlong in, 9, 18, 36; hybrid style in, 70, 74, 95; meiren paintings in, 168, 170, 172, 178; New Year’s pictures in, 104; panoramic scrolls of, 139–40, 140, 142, 143; pictures of, 71, 72, 84; Tiger Hill pleasure district of, 29, 118, 144; urban studio masters of, 6, 13, 35; women artists of, 136–37 Suzhou pian (commercial copies and forgeries), 100, 103, 127, 134 Taicang, 9, 35 Tang Dynasty, 46, 78, 127, 134, 150, 163, 194 Tang Luming, 196 Tang Yin, 13, 18, 21, 92, 99, 100, 146, 154, 161, 162, 233n66, 234n10 Tangdai, 107; Qianlong and His Family Celebrating New Year’s, 106–7, 107

Ten Days’ Massacre, 55 Tianjin Art Museum, 90, 118 Titian, 185 toushi hua (looking-through pictures), 83 Tseng Qing, 19, 36, 71, 73, 77, 95, 220n14 Twelve Beauties in Palace Interiors (anonymous), 47, 49, 49, 52–53, 56, 57 Two Women with Books and Scrolls (anonymous), 128 Two Women Looking through a Moon Window (anonymous), 129 uki’e and ukiyo’e (floating pictures) prints and paintings, 84, 168, 196, 227n41 University of California, Berkeley: Art Museum, 2; East Asian Library, 134 urban studio masters, 3, 5, 6, 14, 16–18, 27, 28, 31–36, 88, 131, 191; at court, 31, 36–42; dif ficulties determining authorship of works of, 100; female viewership for, 25; meiren paintings by, 32–35, 100, 113; narrative paintings of, 40, 131; Ming-era, 13; Westernizing influences on, 70, 170, 180. See also specific artists. Utamaro, 176 van Gulik, Robert, 191, 237n61 Verbiest, Ferdinand, 227n30 Waley, Arthur, 73, 218n38 Wang Chengpei, 97, 166; Lady Waiting in a Doorway, 96, 97–98 Wang Donggao, 132 Wang Hui, 37 Wang Ji, 132 Wang Jian, 100 Wang Qiao, 23, 82, 157, 180, 220n6; A Woman at Her Dressing Table, 23, 24, 203 Wang Shan, 37 Wang Shimin, 8–12, 11, 15, 37, 100; portrait of family and, 114–16, 115 Wang Shizhen, 37 Wang Yuanqi, 68 Wang Yun, 76, 226n21 Wanshou Tu (collaborative work), 37, 220n16

Watt, Ian, 20 wedding pictures, 112 Wei sculptures, 175 Wen Jia, 14, 15 Wen Zhengming, 14, 15, 134 Wen Zhenheng: “Calendar for Displaying Scrolls,” 15–16, 19, 35, 110; Treatise on Superfluous Things (Zhangwu Zhi), 15, 100, 161 Wenley, Archibald, 234n10 Whipping, The (anonymous), 86, 87, 134 Widmer, Ellen, 25, 203 Wierix, Jan and Jerome, Evangelicae historiae imagines, 80, 80 Wilson, Marc, 228n52 Wittkower, Rudolf, 225n2 Woman in a Brothel Presented to a Guest, 156 Woman Fantasizing, Seen Through a Window (anonymous), 188 Woman Resting from Reading (Portrait of a Lady), (anonymous), 65, 172, 175, 175 Woman in a Room, Another Outside (anonymous), 128 Women in a Brothel (anonymous), 155 Women’s Classic of Filial Piety, The (anonymous), 136 Wong, Kwan S., 228n52 Wu Bin, 71, 74, 77, 78, 95; Record of the Year’s Holidays, 77 Wu Hung, 47, 73 Wu Li, 69 Wu Zetian, 162 Wu Zhen, 1 Wu Zhuo, 167, 169 Wuxi, 6, 33, 35, 233n64 Wuxing, 55, 76 xianfa hua (linear-method pictures), 83 Xiao Chen, 76 Xiaoqing, 92, 93, 94, 125 Xiaoshi, 136 Xie Bin, 116 Xie Sui, 110–11; A Gentleman Celebrating His Birthday, 111 xingle tu (picture of enjoying pleasures), 44, 47, 48, 50, 53

264

xingsi (form likeness), 19 Xiwangmu (Queen Mother of the West), 110 Xixiang Ji. See Story of the Western Wing, The Xu Mei, 33, 36–37, 121; Family Scene, 36 Xu Yang, 139–40; The Puji Bridge, from The Flourishing City, 140; The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection, 140, 142, 143 Xuancang, 134 Xuanzong, 9, 194 Yan Song, 14–16, 110 Yan Yi, 104; A Family Celebrating New Year’s, 104, 105 Yan Zhenqing, 163 Yang Boda, 35, 60, 105 Yang Guifei, 9, 11, 12, 16, 162, 191, 194 Yangtze delta region, 9, 17, 88; cities of, 6, 31, 88. See also Jiangnan region; Nanjing; Suzhou; Wuxi; Yangzhou Yangxin Dian (Cultivating the Mind Hall), 44 Yangzhou, 28, 42, 43, 49, 50, 55, 56, 94, 221n23; Eight Eccentrics of, 17, 39–40, 74, 99–100; erotic culture of, 47–48, 49, 222n43; illusionism in, 70, 76, 77; meiren paintings in, 32–35, 165, 168, 172; New Year’s pictures in, 104; urban studio masters of, 6, 18, 33, 39 Yangzhou Huafang Lu (anonymous), 32 Yao Wenhan, 227n42 Yao Zai, 233n64 Ye Tao, 221n20 Ye Xin, 73 Yin Shi, 33; Woman Waiting at Weiqi Board, 34 Yinreng, Prince, 47 Yinzhen, Prince. See Yongzheng Yonezawa, Yoshiho, 104 Yongzheng, 6, 17, 28–29, 69, 158, 187; accession of, 40, 62; court painters of, 32, 35, 39, 42, 59; garden retreat of, 43–44, 48, 51, 221n20, n31; consorts of, 47, 48, 57, 172; paintings depicting,

45, 46, 47, 59, 50, 53, 56, 221n22, 222n41; Westernizing elements during reign of, 74, 226n25 Yuan Dynasty, 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 101 Yuan Jiang, 33–34, 39–40, 74, 221n21, n22, 226n21; Palace at Evening, after Guo Zhongshu, 40, 41 Yuan Shangtong, 104 Yuan Yao, 34, 39, 74 Yuandi (emperor), 57 Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), 39, 42–44, 47, 48, 50–53, 59, 87, 221n20, n31, 222n47 Yu Ji, 192 Yu Jianhua, 226n19 Yu Zhiding, 18–19, 37–39, 77, 110, 185, 187; Searching for Blossoming Plum in the Western Suburbs, 38, 38–39, 77; Woman at a Weiqi Board, 19, 33, 53, 59, 82, 157, 172, 182, 183, 184; Woman in a Weed-Grown Garden Gazing at Rabbit, 59, 157, 172, 178,

181; Woman Reading in a Garden, 157, 179–80, 181 Yun Shouping, 19 Zeitlin, Judith, 234n25 Zen Buddism, 12, 154 Zeng Ao, 220n14 Zhai Hao, 14 Zhang Chang, 136 Zhang Geng, 69, 78 Zhang Hong, 21, 70–71, 95; Scenes of Yue, 70; The Zhi Garden, 70 Zhang Hongxing, The Qianlong Emperor, 223n57 Zhang Jing, 132; Encounter on a Mountain Path, 132 Zhang Tingyan, 49, 50, 55, 222n46 Zhang Weibang, 42–43, 48–50, 55, 59, 60, 221n23; Palace Ladies in a Waterside Pavilion, 43, 46 Zhang Xuan, 78 Zhang Xueliang, 232n58

265

INDEX

Zhang Yin, 118; A Family in Their Villa, 120 Zhang Zeduan, 147 Zhang Zhen, 42–43, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 221n23, n27; Lady at Window, with Two Cats, 42, 43, 46, 48, 53, 170, 172 Zhang Zuolin, 232n58 Zhao Feiyan, 162 Zhao Wei, 110; The Three Stars, 110, 111 Zhao Zuo, 225n10 Zhe school, 26, 27, 217n17 Zhejiang Province, 32, 35, 55, 59, 76, 110 Zheng Xie (Zheng Banqiao), 40, 99 Zhong Kui, 14–16, 35, 103 Zhou Chen, 13, 99 Zhou Fang, 78 Zhou Qi, 23, 25, 203 Zhou Xun, 74 Zong Bing, 163 Zou Yigui, 69, 80 Zou Zhe, 73

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