2. Qualities of Chinese Painting

The rejection of perspective—Of realism—Line as nobler than color—Form as rhythm—Representation by suggestion—Conventions and restrictions—Sincerity of Chinese art

What is it that distinguishes Chinese painting, and makes it so completely different from every other school of painting in history except its own pupils in Japan? First, of course, its scroll or screen form. But this is an external matter; far more intrinsic and fundamental is the Chinese scorn of perspective and shadow. When two European painters accepted the invitation of the Emperor K’ang-hsi to come and paint decorations for his palaces, their work was rejected because they had made the farther columns in their pictures shorter than the nearer ones; nothing could be more false and artificial, argued the Chinese, than to represent distances where obviously there were none.⁹⁶ Neither party could understand the prejudice of the other, for the Europeans had been taught to look at a scene from a level with it, while the Chinese artists were accustomed to visualize it as seen from above.⁹⁷ Shadows, too, seemed to the Chinese to be out of place in a form of art which, as they understod it, aimed not to imitate reality, but to give pleasure, convey moods, and suggest ideas through the medium of perfect form.

The form was everything in these paintings, and it was sought not in warmth or splendor of color, but in rhythm and accuracy of line. In the early paintings color was sternly excluded, and in the masters it was rare; black ink and a brush were enough, for a color had nothing to do with form. Form, as the artist-theorist Hsieh Ho said, is rhythm: first in the sense that a Chinese painting is the visible record of a rhythmic gesture, a dance executed by the hand;⁹⁸ and again in the sense that a significant form reveals the “rhythm of the spirit,” the essence and quiet movement of reality.⁹⁹Finally, the body of rhythm is line—not as describing the actual contours of things, but as building forms that, through suggestion or symbol, express the soul. The skill of execution, as distinct from the power of perception, feeling and imagination, lies—in Chinese painting—almost entirely in accuracy and delicacy of line. The painter must observe with patient care, possess intense feeling under strict control, conceive his purpose clearly, and then, without the possibility of correction, transfer to the silk, with a few continuous and easeful strokes, his representative imagination. The art of line reached its apex in China and Japan, as the art of color touched its zenith in Venice and the Netherlands.

Chinese painting never cared for realism, but sought rather to suggest than to describe; it left “truth” to science, and gave itself to beauty. A branch emerging nowhence, and bearing a few leaves or blossoms against a clear sky, was sufficient subject for the greatest master; his handling and proportion of the empty background were tests of his courage and his skill. One of the subjects proposed to candidates for admission to Hui Tsung’s Painting Academy may serve to illustrate the Chinese emphasis on indirect suggestion as against explicit representation: the contestants were asked to illustrate by paintings a line of poetry—“The hoof of his steed comes back heavily charged with the scent of the trampled flowers.” The successful competitor was an artist who painted a rider with a cluster of butterflies following at the horse’s heels.

As the form was everything, the subject might be anything. Men were rarely the center or essence of the picture; when they appeared they were almost always old, and nearly all alike. The Chinese painter, though he was never visibly a pessimist, seldom looked at the world through the eyes of youth. Portraits were painted, but indifferently well; the artist was not interested in individuals. He loved flowers and animals, apparently, far more than men, and spent himself upon them recklessly; Hui Tsung, with an empire at his command, gave half his life to painting birds and flowers. Sometimes the flowers or the animals were symbols, like the lotus or the dragon; but for the-most part they were drawn for their own sake, because the charm and mystery of life appeared as completely in them as in a man. The horse was especially loved, and artists like Han Kan did hardly anything else but paint one form after another of that living embodiment of artistic line.

It is true that painting suffered in China, first from religious conventions, and then from academic restrictions; that the copying and imitation of old masters became a retarding fetich in the training of students, and that the artist was in many matters confined to a given number of permitted ways of fashioning his material.¹⁰⁰ “In my young days,” said an eminent Sung critic, “I praised the master whose pictures I liked; but as my judgment matured I praised myself for liking what the masters had chosen to have me like.”¹⁰¹It is astonishing how much vitality remained in this art despite its conventions and canons; it was here as Hume thought it had been with the censored writers of the French Enlightenment: the very limitations from which the artist suffered compelled him to be brilliant.

What saved the Chinese painters from stagnation was the sincerity of their feeling for nature. Taoism had taught it to them, and Buddhism had made it stronger by teaching them that man and nature are one in the flow and change and unity of life. As the poets found in nature a retreat from urban strife, and the philosophers sought in it a model of morals and a guide to life, so the painters brooded by solitary streams, and lost themselves in deeply wooded hills, feeling that in these speechless and lasting things the nameless spirit had expressed itself more clearly than in the turbulent career and thought of men.* Nature, which is so cruel in China, lavishing death with cold and flood, was accepted stoically as the supreme god of the Chinese, and received from them not merely religious sacrifice, but the worship of their philosophy, their literature and their art. Let it serve as an indication of the age and depth of culture in China that a thousand years before Claude Lorraine, Rousseau, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand the Chinese made nature a passion, and created a school of landscape painting whose work throughout the Far East became one of the sovereign expressions of mankind.