Painting Styles Across Periods: Reading Qing Art

I want to discuss the copperplate engravings of the European Palaces at the Old Summer Palace. Notice their very high viewpoint. Looking down from such a height, we can see many things inside; the gate in front does not block what lies behind it. We can see the little chapel, or whatever it is, including its entire floor. Why? Because our angle is so high. This is a typical angle in eighteenth-century Chinese painting. Whether the painter was Wang Yuanqi, Bada Shanren, or someone else, it is the angle of the age. The European Palaces are another example. Foreigners worked on them; foreign painters at the Qing court introduced the fascinating technique of copperplate engraving. Look at how the trees are painted: every tree is explained clearly from root to crown, so clearly that you can count them. The ground plane between them remains visible and consistent. Its recession from front to back is rational. This consistency had been developing since the Wanli era. Everything is quiet, but clouds race around above. What are these clouds doing? Do they look a little like dragons? They are in motion. As art historians, we need to note this as a possible characteristic. I had not seen clouds playing about in quite this way. To describe this picture, then, we would say that its ground plane is continuous from front to back. Objects in front do not block those behind. Even among the distant clusters of trees, we can see the roots, the spaces between roots and trunks, and the ground itself with great clarity. It resembles a picture constructed with Western perspective. Yet the clouds have their own movement. I would say they have declared independence: you may stand at attention, but they will not. Qing clouds never simply stand still; they possess a vitality of their own. Now I am going to put you to sleep by lining up many works I believe belong to this period and showing the features they share. One major shared feature resembles the letter V. A block inclines concentrically into a V. In this engraving, you can count layer after layer—one, two, three, all the way to eighteen—repeating the pattern without embarrassment. This is Baroque behavior: taking a single motif and doing it over and over. In music, a unit might originally contain four beats. Sometimes one note occupies all four beats; sometimes four notes are required. Here, however, each beat seems to contain four or eight notes, making it tremendously fast: diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle. That is the Baroque feeling. The feeling is repetition, repetition, and repetition again—dense repetition. That is Baroque. It has an internal force and vitality: numerous, tight, crowded, and vigorous. Perhaps by then it had exhausted every other creative possibility. Chinese painting has named dots and texture strokes with strange terms such as “rolling-cloud texture.” In the Song there were many distinct forms, though one need not name them. You can scarcely find two or three dots that look alike, because every stroke has a reason. Here that is no longer so. Unable to invent another form, the painter repeats one dot again and again. The three works above are all Qing court paintings. But look at the entertaining clouds on the right. Do you know the title? Emperor Minghuang's Journey to Shu. We once called it “Tang,” then a few years later “a Song copy of a Tang work”—as if marking it down from one hundred to ninety-five. In fact, it is “Tang made by the Qing,” a useful category in itself. The work below is by the eighteenth-century court painter Tang Dai, Landscape after Fan Kuan. Another is attributed to Li Gonglin, Mountain Villa. It is intensely Baroque: even the waterfalls follow the repeated pattern. Many supposed ancient paintings made in the Qing show old men picnicking outdoors, yet the environment is eighteenth-century and deeply Baroque, with everything repeated to excess. At lower right is Zhan Ziqian's Spring Excursion. Its clouds are also extraordinarily beautiful, so I put the works together. Some painters represented their own age; others represented another. Some works were deliberate forgeries, but all are exceptionally beautiful. This supposed Tang Emperor Minghuang's Journey to Shu is magnificent. Please do not be angry. Mine is only one voice, and I may well be wrong. Here you can see the features we have discussed in paintings bearing Wang Hui's signature. They have concentric V-shaped mountains and innumerable trees. Wang Hui painted with abundance and tremendous energy. His dots are sensual; look closely at his brush and ink and they are truly sensual. I later understood why C. C. Wang told me that Wang Hui was the first old master he fell in love with. He copied him repeatedly, bought a large handscroll, and copied it countless times. Later he decided Wang Yuanqi was better, more interesting, and more elevated. We can also see clouds acting independently of the picture. They form a wall-like loop of their own, rising and falling with the trees to cr…