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Chinese Landscape Painting: Mountains the Scholars Never Climbed
In 1072 the court painter Guo Xi signed and dated a large hanging scroll called Early Spring, made for the Song court. It shows no place a traveller could find and stand in. Mist pools between crags that swell and recede as though breathing, and a fisherman's boat and a mule train surface and vanish among rock forms built from years of habit and convention, not from a morning spent sketching one hillside. Guo Xi did not pretend otherwise: in his writings on landscape, recorded by his son, he said a good painting let a city-bound official travel in his mind without leaving his desk. Within two generations, the scholar-officials who collected and judged paintings like his had turned that same idea, that a landscape is made rather than copied, into an argument against professional painters altogether. For roughly a thousand years, from the Tang poet Wang Wei to the Ming critic Dong Qichang, China's scholar-officials, the literati, painted mountains and water (shanshui) as self-cultivation, a private discipline rather than a trade. Painting for a fee was looked down upon. They looked hard at real mountains. What they refused was the idea that looking, on its own, was the point. An Ancestor Chosen After the Fact Wang Wei (699 to 759) is the tradition's usual starting point, though he did not set out to found one. He was a Tang dynasty official who wrote poetry and painted as a private pursuit, and almost nothing he painted survives in a form anyone can trust. His reputation as the ancestor of literati landscape was built three centuries later by the poet and official Su Shi, who wrote a colophon on a Wang Wei painting of misty hills at Lantian, since lost, and delivered a verdict that stuck: that there was a painting hidden inside Wang Wei's poems, and a poem hidden inside his paintings. That line did more to place Wang Wei at the head of the tradition than anything Wang Wei painted. The literati chose their ancestor after the fact, then wrote the history backwards from that choice. Meaning Over Likeness The clearest statement of the literati position comes from the eleventh century. The scholar-official Ouyang Xiu wrote that painters of the past had painted meaning, not outer form. His younger contemporary Su Shi went further: "Anyone who judges painting by likeness has the understanding of a child." Su Shi ranked a Tang court muralist, Wu Daozi, below Wang Wei for the same reason. Wu Daozi could paint anything, Su Shi conceded, but he remained a mere craftsman, while Wang Wei's simpler, sparer mural reached something beyond the image itself. The connoisseur and collector Mi Fu argued the same point from another angle: horses and oxen could be copied from life and still convince, but a copied landscape never succeeds, because its value lay in the painter's own thought rather than in the scene before him. Li Gonglin, part of Su Shi's circle, put the theory into practice. He painted his family estate in the Longmian Mountains while sitting in the capital, hundreds of miles from the actual site, in a deliberately archaic style that resembled no real hillside anyone could visit. That invented estate, not a sketch made on the spot, was the literati's idea of a true likeness. Ink Before Colour Brush and ink took priority over colour for reasons of status as much as taste. Every scholar who sat the civil service examinations had to write well, and examiners marked calligraphy nearly as closely as content, so a clumsy hand could sink an able essay. Critics judged calligraphy as a direct record of character, and landscape painters carried the same standard into their texture strokes (cunfa), built from the same wrist movements as handwriting. A painting could be read, like a letter, for the quality of the mind behind it. Mineral colour, especially the blue-and-green palette used on decorative and courtly landscapes, took skilled preparation and time, and it was associated with the paid professional's workshop. Ink and paper were cheap, and forgiving of a spontaneous hand: a scholar could pick up a brush after dinner and paint from feeling, but he could not mix and layer malachite green so casually. Monochrome ink was not a limitation literati painters worked within. It was the version of the medium suited to a man with another job. A Poem, a Seal and a Painting on One Sheet Chinese critics called the combination of poetry, calligraphy and painting on a single work the "three perfections" (sanjue), a term first recorded in the New Book of Tang. A literatus rarely handed over a finished, sealed object the way a commissioned professional did. He often added his own poem into the blank space above the ink mountains, then left room for friends and later owners to add colophons and seals of their own over the centuries. Some scrolls reached the twentieth century carrying inscriptions from half a dozen different hands and eras, a private conversation still being carried on in the margins. Format mattered too. A hanging scroll was displayed briefly, then rolled and put away. A handscroll was never displayed at all in the Western sense: it was unrolled a little at a time, right to left, in the company of one or two friends, so that a mountain journey unfolded exactly as slowly as its owner allowed. Neither format was built for a shop wall. From a Monumental Cliff to an Empty Riverbank Fan Kuan, who died around 1023, is said to have turned down official life and studied mountains directly, spending days seated beneath cliffs and nights walking the snow-covered hills by moonlight. The result, Travellers among Mountains and Streams, is not a record of that experience. It is a single invented massif nearly seven feet tall, cropped at the edges as though there were more mountain than the silk could hold, with a mule train and two travellers reduced to a detail near its base. Direct observation fed the picture. It did not dictate its shape. Three centuries later, after the Song collapse and the Mongol conquest, that same discipline turned austere. Ni Zan (1301 to 1374), one of four painters later grouped together as the Yuan masters, gave away his property rather than serve the new court and spent his last decades moving between the houses of friends around Lake Tai. His late paintings repeat one composition: a foreground bank scattered with a few thin trees, then a wide empty river standing between it and a low, distant shore. A figure is almost never in sight. Ni Zan, The Rongxi Studio (1372): the 'one river, two banks' composition, a few thin trees on the near bank with bare paper standing in for water and a low distant shore. National Palace Museum, Taipei. The Rongxi Studio, painted in 1372, two years before Ni Zan's death, reduces Fan Kuan's towering invention to next to nothing: a handful of trees at the edge of a blank stretch of paper standing in for both water and shore. Ni Zan called that reduction, not the cliff, the finished statement. Dong Qichang Draws a Line Through History The theory reached its final, most influential form under Dong Qichang (1555 to 1636): a wealthy landowner, high official, collector and painter who was also the most consequential critic of his age. Dong Qichang split the entire history of landscape painting into two schools. His Southern School ran from Wang Wei through the tenth-century masters Dong Yuan and Juran to the Song connoisseur Mi Fu and on to the Yuan masters, Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan and Wang Meng: scholars who painted for themselves, without a client. His Northern School collected the trained court professionals, among them the Southern Song court painters Ma Yuan and Xia Gui. The names came from Chan Buddhism, whose southern branch taught sudden enlightenment and whose northern branch taught a slow, disciplined climb towards it. Dong Qichang borrowed the metaphor for style, not geography, and judged his own Southern School the superior of the two. His landscapes, including Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains of 1617, were a deliberate continuation of it. The division has shaped how the subject gets taught ever since, even though Dong Qichang built it from his own side of an argument, and his own class. The Trade They Disdained The amateur ideal was never quite as clean as its theorists claimed. Zhao Mengfu, a scholar-painter later folded into Dong Qichang's Southern lineage, worked for years as a paid instructor and, by some accounts, relied on assistants to finish work sold under his name. His wife, Guan Daosheng, admired for her ink bamboo, painted Buddhist temple murals on commission. Historians of the period now argue that economically disinterested amateurism was, for most Yuan scholar-painters, an ideal rather than an accurate account of how they lived. The line between a literatus and a professional was real, but it was drawn as much in rhetoric, in who called whom vulgar, as in anyone's ledger. What survived from a thousand years of that argument was not a clean division of labour. It was a way of painting a mountain nobody had climbed, and insisting that this was the only mountain worth painting. Art of China Along the River During Qingming Chinese Landscape Painting Art of China I: Neolithic Pottery & Jade Art of China II: Shang Bronzes Art of China III: Han Silk & Lacquer Art of China IV: Tang Gold & Silver Art of China V: Song Porcelain Art of China VI: Ming & Qing
Kuniyoshi Drew Kabuki Actors as Cats to Dodge the 1842 Ban
In 1842 the shogunate's senior councillor, Mizuno Tadakuni, banned the publication of woodblock prints showing kabuki actors, courtesans and geisha. It was one clause in a wider programme of moral austerity known as the Tenpō Reforms, and on paper it ended a whole category of print overnight. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, already Edo's most inventive designer of warriors and monsters, simply moved the actors somewhere the law could not reach. He drew them as cats grooming themselves in a leading man's exact stage pose, as goldfish with a familiar crest stamped on the fin, as toys and paper fans carrying a face any kabuki-goer would know at a glance. He pushed the joke further once, and it nearly cost him. The Earth Spider Conjures Up Demons at the Mansion of Minamoto Yorimitsu, a triptych from the following year, shows a warrior asleep and ill while demons close in around him; Edo read it at once as a portrait of a sick government surrounded by the people it had ruined. The magistrates called Kuniyoshi and his publisher in to account for it. Both talked their way out of a formal charge, though the printing blocks were confiscated. A silk dyer's son learns from Toyokuni Kuniyoshi was born in Edo in the last days of 1797 by the Japanese calendar, which places his birthday on 1 January 1798 in the Western one. His father dyed silk for a living. As a boy he is said to have shown the print master Utagawa Toyokuni a drawing of Shōki, the demon-queller of Chinese legend, and impressed him enough to be taken on as a pupil around 1811. Training in Toyokuni's studio meant the standard Utagawa curriculum: actor portraits and pictures of beautiful women, the two genres that sold. Kuniyoshi took the art name by which he is known and set up on his own around 1814, and the years that followed were lean. By one account he was reduced for a time to repairing and reselling discarded tatami mats to get by. Commissions came slowly. It took thirteen more years, and one particular series, to change that. The Suikoden makes his name In 1827 the publisher Kagaya Kichiemon issued the first instalments of One Hundred and Eight Heroes of the Popular Suikoden (Tsūzoku Suikoden Gōketsu Hyakuhachinin no Hitori), Kuniyoshi's single-sheet portraits of the outlaw-heroes of the Chinese Water Margin tale in its Japanese retelling. Each print gave one hero the full-page, close-up treatment: a fixed stare, a weapon, and skin covered in dragons, tigers, peonies and demons rendered as elaborate tattoos. Kyūmonryū Shishin, "Nine Dragons" Shi Jin, bares a back covered in coiling dragon tattoos in one of the set's best-known sheets. The design was new to print and, by most accounts, new to Edo fashion too: tattoo motifs Kuniyoshi invented for paper are credited with helping start a vogue for full-body irezumi among firemen and labourers who wanted the same designs on their own skin. The series ran for years and made Kuniyoshi the leading designer of warrior prints in Japan, a position he held for the rest of his career even as he moved into views of famous places, ghost stories and comic sheets of frogs and other animals mimicking kabuki roles. The Tenpō Reforms reach the print shops Shogun Tokugawa Ienari died in 1841. His successor's government handed real power to Mizuno Tadakuni, a rōjū (senior councillor), who used the change to launch a broad programme of retrenchment named for the Tenpō era, covering sumptuary limits on dress and festivals as well as tighter restrictions on the size and cost of woodblock prints. The print trade's specific blow landed in 1842, when the production of prints depicting kabuki actors, courtesans and geisha was prohibited outright. For Edo's publishers this was not a minor loss. Actor portraits and pictures of beautiful women were the two best-selling genres in the trade, the genres Kuniyoshi himself had trained in years before. Mizuno fell from office in 1843, driven out over a separate and deeply unpopular land-reallocation edict, but the print ban he had imposed did not lift with him. Enforcement continued for several more years and only eased around 1846, when actors began to reappear in prints, at first still folded into scenery and crowd scenes rather than named outright on a theatre bill. Cats, goldfish and a wardrobe of disguises Kuniyoshi's workaround was to keep drawing actors and simply stop calling them that. Around 1842 he produced A Hundred Cats' Physiognomies (Neko no Hyaku Mensō), showing performers from a famous scene in the play Chūshingura as cats: the pose, a crest worked into a paw or a collar, the tilt of a whiskered face were enough for a regular theatregoer to name every actor being sent up. A companion print did the same trick with goldfish, each fish carrying an actor's mon, or family crest, on its fin so the joke could be read at a glance. Others turn up disguised as toys, kitchen implements and folding fans. None of this broke the letter of the ban. A cat is a cat; a goldfish is a goldfish; the magistrates had prohibited pictures of actors, not pictures of animals that happened to strike an actor's pose. Kuniyoshi's publishers understood the distinction and kept printing. A demon-haunted shogun asleep Not every print from these years was so easily defended. The Earth Spider Conjures Up Demons at the Mansion of Minamoto Yorimitsu, published in 1843, shows the Heian-era warrior Yorimitsu lying ill and asleep while a monstrous spider spins its web above him. His retainers sit in the foreground playing a board game, oblivious, as grotesque yōkai crowd in from every side. Read as a straightforward illustration of an old warrior legend, the print was unremarkable. Read as commentary on the current government, with the sleeping, sickly Yorimitsu standing in for a shogunate that had lost its grip and the demons for the officials and citizens the reforms had damaged, it was something else again. Edo read it the second way almost immediately. The authorities noticed too: Kuniyoshi and his publisher were brought in for questioning, and the blocks used to print it were seized. Neither man was formally punished. Whether Kuniyoshi intended the reading that made the print famous is still debated; what is certain is that he and his publisher denied it under questioning, and got away with the denial. A house that ran on cats The cats were more than camouflage. By several accounts Kuniyoshi kept a dozen or more of them in his studio at any one time, working with a kitten tucked into the sleeve of his kimono while he painted. When one died he had it buried with a Buddhist funeral and gave it a posthumous name recorded on a small altar he kept at home, alongside what visitors described as a register of his cats' deaths. Cats appear in his work from well before the Tenpō ban and long after it lifted; the appetite for parody just gave a personal habit a commercial outlet for a few years. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (c.1847-50): cats stand in for the stations of the road, each pose or prop a pun on a place name. Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a triptych from around 1847 to 1850, has nothing to do with disguising actors. It takes Hiroshige's Tōkaidō series, itself an account of the fifty-three post-stations on the road between Edo and Kyoto, and replaces every view with a pun: fifty-five cats in total, one for each station plus the two endpoints, each pose or prop a play on the sound of a place name. Understanding the jokes now takes a glossary. Buying the joke in 1850 apparently took nothing more than being able to read a cat's expression, which for Kuniyoshi's audience was evidently a skill already well practised. The students who carried the line on Kuniyoshi ran one of the largest studios of his generation and, by his own students' account, a cheerful one. Yoshitoshi, later called the last master of the woodblock print, joined as a teenager and became his most important pupil. Yoshitora, Yoshiiku, Yoshikazu, Yoshitsuya and Yoshifuji all trained under him and carried Utagawa-school warrior and actor prints into the second half of the century. So did Kyōsai, who arrived at the studio around 1837 at the age of six and stayed until he was nine. Decades later, in a book of reminiscences published in 1887, Kyōsai drew the scene from memory: Kuniyoshi mid-lesson, brush in hand, two of his older students caught mid-scuffle in the corner of the room. He did not draw the cats. By every other account, there would have been several in the picture if he had. Masters of Ukiyo-e What Is Ukiyo-e? Hokusai Hiroshige Utamaro Sharaku Kuniyoshi Yoshitoshi Ohara Koson
Utamaro Was Shackled for Fifty Days for One Print of a Warlord
In the fifth month of 1804, officers of the Tokugawa shogunate arrested Kitagawa Utamaro, the most sought-after designer of women's portraits in Edo. His crime was a set of woodblock prints showing the sixteenth-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi at a cherry-blossom party with his wife and concubines, each one named beside her likeness, drawn from the popular chronicle Ehon Taikōki. Naming the Taikō, or any recent military ruler, in a commercial print was against the law. Utamaro was jailed for several days, then manacled at his own house for about fifty days, and his publishers were fined. He was in his early fifties, at the height of his reputation as the pre-eminent painter of bijin (pictures of beautiful women) in Japan. He died two years later, in 1806, and historians of ukiyo-e still debate how much those fifty days in chains had to do with it. The print that broke the law The prints that ended Utamaro's freedom, however briefly, were not shunga or courtesan studies, the material usually blamed for his censorship troubles. They showed Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537 to 1598), the warlord who unified Japan before the Tokugawa family took power, entertaining his wife and concubines at a spring outing to view cherry blossoms. The gathering, held at Daigo-ji temple in Kyoto in 1598 not long before Hideyoshi's death, was already familiar from popular history. Utamaro's source was the Ehon Taikōki, an illustrated chronicle of Hideyoshi's rise published between 1797 and 1802 and staged repeatedly as kabuki and jōruri between 1799 and 1804. Depicting named, identifiable military rulers, Hideyoshi above all, was forbidden under shogunate law. Hideyoshi's son and heir had been destroyed by the first Tokugawa shogun in 1615; a picture of the old warlord surrounded by named women, sold in the idiom of a Yoshiwara courtesan print, was not a comfortable subject for his successors to see in circulation. Utamaro was not alone in misjudging the risk. Kitagawa Tsukimaro, Utagawa Toyokuni, Katsukawa Shuntei, Katsukawa Shun'ei and the writer Jippensha Ikku were caught in the same case, along with their publishers. Utamaro, the best known of the group, was jailed for several days and then sentenced to about fifty days in manacles at his own house. The publishers paid heavy fines. Toyoaki becomes Utamaro Utamaro's origins are not well documented. He was born around 1753, and even his birthplace, variously given as Edo, Kyoto, Osaka and Kawagoe, is not settled. He trained under Toriyama Sekien, a Kanō-schooled painter turned ukiyo-e artist who taught him for years before his own death in 1788. Utamaro published minor book illustrations and actor prints from about 1775 under the name Kitagawa Toyoaki. At a banquet in 1782 he announced a new art name, Utamaro, the one he used for the rest of his career. By 1783 he had moved into the household of Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the Yoshiwara publisher who had built his business on guidebooks to the licensed quarter and was about to become the most important print publisher in Edo. Utamaro lived and worked under Tsutaya's roof for several years, alongside other talents the publisher had gathered, Kitao Masanobu among them. His earliest bijin prints followed the elegant, elongated figures that Torii Kiyonaga had made fashionable through the 1780s. Only in the early 1790s did Utamaro find a manner unmistakably his own, and it was Tsutaya who published it. The invention of the ōkubi-e What changed, around 1791, was distance. Instead of the full-length figure that Kiyonaga and his contemporaries favoured, Utamaro began cropping in: head and shoulders, or the figure from the waist up, set against a plain or mica-dusted ground with no interior and no furniture to place the woman anywhere in particular. Historians of the print call the format ōkubi-e (large-head pictures). Neither the close crop nor the coloured ground was new by itself, but Utamaro was the first to use them as a sustained programme rather than an occasional device. Kitagawa Utamaro, Naniwaya Okita, a Ryōgoku teahouse waitress he drew repeatedly, in a large-head bijin portrait. Metropolitan Museum of Art. The effect turned a decorative genre into something closer to characterisation. A face filling the sheet has to carry the print on its own. Utamaro gave his women narrowed or heavy-lidded eyes, private half-smiles, a downward tilt of the head that reads as thought rather than display. Three Beauties of the Present Day, published by Tsutaya around 1792 to 1793, arranges three real Edo women, the geisha Tomimoto Toyohina and the teahouse workers Naniwaya Kita and Takashima Hisa, in a tight triangular cluster of overlapping profiles. Naming ordinary women in prints was against the law, so each is identified instead by a family crest worked into her clothing or her fan. The mica ground behind them catches the light rather than describing a place. Mica, sumptuary law and Tsutaya's shop The shimmering backgrounds were made with kira, powdered mica, brushed onto paper so that the pigment caught the light like a dull metal. It was an expensive effect, several separate printings for one sheet, and it needed a publisher willing to pay for it. Tsutaya was that publisher. He had built his fortune on Yoshiwara guidebooks before moving into prints and illustrated books, and he understood the market for a luxury object sold as ephemera. Their partnership, from 1783 until Tsutaya's death in 1797, produced some of the finest printing of the period. It also operated under constant political risk. Between 1787 and 1793 the shogunate's chief councillor, Matsudaira Sadanobu, pushed through the Kansei Reforms, a programme of sumptuary regulation that reached into the publishing trade: restrictions on subject matter, on naming ordinary women, and eventually, in 1795, a ban on mica grounds themselves. Publishers who defied the rules risked fines or worse. Tsutaya had already lost half his assets in 1791, after the writer Santō Kyōden, whom he published, was sentenced to fifty days in manacles for three sharebon that broke the sumptuary code. Utamaro's mica-ground bijin were a luxury made inside a shrinking legal space, years before his own arrest showed how much further that space could close. Individual faces, not ideal types Utamaro's reputation rests on more than technique. Kiyonaga and his followers had painted an ideal, a type of beauty repeated from print to print. Utamaro increasingly painted particular women. Teahouse workers such as Naniwaya Okita and Takashima Ohisa appear again and again across his output, recognisable from sheet to sheet by more than a crest. He was interested in a woman's character and mood as much as her surface prettiness, in a sideways glance or a hand pressed against a cheek. The law made plain identification difficult. Naming ordinary women in a commercial print was forbidden, so Utamaro and his publishers found ways round it: a crest, a shop name folded into the design, and from around 1795 a run of prints that hid a beauty's name inside a visual puzzle. His range went beyond the Yoshiwara and its teahouses. He drew women diving for awabi shellfish, mothers with children and old women alongside the courtesans and geisha who made his name. Series such as Ten Types of Women's Physiognomy, published in the same years as Three Beauties, isolated one face and one mood at a time: absorption, in a young woman blowing into a glass noisemaker; vanity, in another checking her teeth in a mirror. The last two years Tsutaya Jūzaburō died in 1797. Utamaro kept working, prolifically: across his career he is credited with more than two thousand print designs, over a hundred series of bijin alone, illustrations for close to a hundred books and around thirty paintings, issued through nearly sixty different publishers. Even so, several historians of ukiyo-e judge that his most inventive decade closed with Tsutaya's shop. By the early 1800s the large-head format he had invented was everywhere, copied by rivals and by his own students, Tsukimaro and Kiyomine among them, and his own late series increasingly repeat earlier ideas rather than extend them. The Ehon Taikōki case, in 1804, landed on a fifty-one-year-old artist already past his best years. He served his sentence, fifty days manacled at home after a short jailing, and went back to print design, but not for long. He died in Edo on the twentieth day of the ninth month of 1806, aged fifty-three. Whether the manacles caused his decline in any medical sense is not something the record can settle. What the record shows is the timing: arrest in 1804, a diminished final period, death in 1806. Utamaro reaches Paris Japanese prints began reaching Europe in quantity after trade reopened in 1854, first as packing paper around export porcelain, then as a market in their own right. Utamaro's sheets were among the most sought after. Claude Monet owned more than thirty of them. Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and James McNeill Whistler all collected or studied his bijin. What drew them was the crop: a face or a gesture filling the sheet, with no perspective box or interior to place it in. The Paris shop La Porte Chinoise, a gathering point from the 1860s for painters curious about Japanese imports, did more to shape Impressionist and Post-Impressionist composition than its modest premises suggested. None of this was available to Utamaro. He worked for Edo publishers and Edo buyers, inside Edo law, and the same shogunate that could manacle him for fifty days over a print of a dead warlord had no mechanism for objecting to what happened when his sheets reached Montmartre. By the time Monet was buying them, the ōkubi-e format Utamaro had invented to sell portraits of teahouse waitresses was reshaping paintings the shogunate would never see and could never have licensed. Masters of Ukiyo-e What Is Ukiyo-e? Hokusai Hiroshige Utamaro Sharaku Kuniyoshi Yoshitoshi Ohara Koson