Chinese Painters Part 1

Chinese Painters.

by Raphael Petrucci.

INTRODUCTION

Whatever its outward expression, human thought remains essentially unchanged and, throughout all of its manifestations, is fundamentally the same. Varying phases are but accidents and underneath the divers wrappings of historic periods or different civilizations, the heart as well as the mind of man has been moved by the same desires.

Art possesses a unity like that of nature. It is profound and stirring, precisely because it blends and perpetuates feeling and intelligence by means of outward expressions. Of all human achievements art is the most vital, the one that is dowered with eternal youth, for it awakens in the soul emotions which neither time nor civilization has ever radically altered. Therefore, in commencing the study of an art of strange appearance, what we must seek primarily is the exact nature of the complexity of ideas and feelings upon which it is based. Such is the task presented to us, and since the problem which we here approach is the general study of Chinese painting, we must prepare ourselves first to master the peculiarities of its appearance and technique, in order to understand later on the motives which inspired it.

While the first part of this study will carry us far from our habitual modes of thought, the second part will bring us back into a domain which our own philosophies, sciences and arts have already made familiar.

Admittedly, Chinese painting is governed by distinctive ideas. Born of a civilization vastly different from our own, it may at times appear in a guise that seems incomprehensible. It would be astonis.h.i.+ng, however, if Western intelligence were unable to grasp an aesthetic code of a magnitude which is too great to be ignored.

The progress of history and of criticism has given us the opportunity to reach a comprehension of the most peculiar formulas. Our culture is sufficiently broad to allow us to perceive the beauty of an Egyptian fresco or an a.s.syrian bas-relief as well as of a Byzantine mosaic or a painting of the Renaissance. We have therefore no excuse for remaining inaccessible to the art of the Far East and we have surely all the mental vigor that is requisite in order to accustom ourselves to the foreign nature of its presentation. It is in the realm of painting that this foreign element is most noticeable. This is due partly to a special technique and partly to the nature of the doctrines which serve as its inspiration.

It behooves us then to acquaint ourselves with these new aspects of the human soul. That is the justification for this little book. It forms an introduction in which gaps are shown without attempt at concealment and is presented in all modesty.

PART ONE TECHNIQUE

I. EQUIPMENT OF THE PAINTER

Where our painters have chosen wood or canvas as a ground, the Chinese have employed silk or paper. While our art recognizes that drawing itself, quite apart from painting, is a sufficient objective, drawing and painting have always been closely intermingled in the Far East. While the mediums used in Europe for painting in color, distemper, tempera and oil, led to an exact study of form, the colors employed by the Orientals--at times brilliant, at times subdued with an almost studied restraint--preserved a singular fluidity and lent themselves to undefined evanescences which gave them a surprising charm.

The early paintings were generally done on cotton, coa.r.s.e silk or paper.

In the eighth century, under the T'ang dynasty, the use of finer silk began. The dressing was removed with boiling water, the silk was then sized and smoothed with a paddle. The use of silken fabric of the finest weave, prepared with a thick sizing, became general during the Sung dynasty. Papers were made of vegetable fibres, princ.i.p.ally of bamboo.

Being prepared, as was the silk, with a sizing of alum, they became practically indestructible. Upon these silks and papers the painter worked with brush and Chinese ink,[1] color being introduced with more or less freedom or restraint.

The brushes are of different types. Each position of the brush conforms to a specific quality of the line, either sharp and precise or broad and quivering, the ink spreading in strong touches or thinning to delicate shades.

The colors are simple, of mineral or vegetable origin. Chinese painters have always avoided mixing colors so far as possible. From malachite they obtained several shades of green, from cinnabar or sulphide of mercury, a number of reds. They knew also how to combine mercury, sulphur and potash to produce vermilion. From peroxide of mercury they drew coloring powders which furnished shades ranging from brick red to orange yellow. During the T'ang dynasty coral was ground to secure a special red, while white was extracted from burnt oyster sh.e.l.ls. White lead was later subst.i.tuted for this lime white. Carmine lake they obtained from madder, yellows from the sap of the rattan, blues from indigo. To these must be added the different shades of Chinese ink and lastly, gold in leaf and in powder.

[1] Chinese ink is a very different composition from the ink of Western countries. It is a solid made of soot obtained by burning certain plants, which is then combined with glue or oil and moulded into a cake and dried. Other ingredients may be added to produce sheen or a dead finish. It improves with age if properly kept. The cake is moistened and rubbed on a slab, and the ink thus obtained must be used in a special way and with special care to produce the full effect.--TRANSLATOR.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE I. SCULPTURED STONES OF THE HAN DYNASTY Second to Third Centuries. Rubbings taken by the Chavannes Expedition.]

The brush-stroke in the painting of the Far East is of supreme importance.

We know that this could not be otherwise if we recall that the characters in Chinese writing are ideographs, not actually _written_, but rather _drawn_. The stroke is not a mere formal, lifeless sign. It is an expression in which is reflected the beauty of the thought that inspired it as well as the quality of the soul of him who gives it form. In writing, as in painting, it reveals to us the character and the conception of its author. Placed at the service of certain philosophical ideas, which will be set forth later on, this technique was bound to lead to a special code of Aesthetics. The painter seeks to suggest with an unbroken line the fundamental character of a form. His endeavor, in this respect, is to simplify the objective images of the world to the extreme, replacing them with ideal images, which prolonged meditation shall have freed from every non-essential. It may therefore be readily understood how the brush-stroke becomes so personal a thing, that in itself it serves to reveal the hand of the master. There is no Chinese book treating of painting which does not discuss and lay stress upon the value of its aesthetic code.

II. REPRESENTATION OF FORMS

It has often been said that in Chinese painting, as in j.a.panese painting, perspective is ignored. Nothing is further from the truth. This error arises from the fact that we have confused one system of perspective with perspective as a whole. There are as many systems of perspective as there are conventional laws for the representation of s.p.a.ce.

The practice of drawing and painting offers the student the following problem in descriptive geometry: _to represent the three dimensions of s.p.a.ce by means of a plane surface of two dimensions_. The Egyptians and a.s.syrians solved this problem by throwing down vertical objects upon one plane, which demands a great effort of abstraction on the part of the observer. European perspective, built up in the fifteenth century upon the remains of the geometric knowledge of the Greeks, is based on the monocular theory used by the latter. In this system, it is a.s.sumed that the picture is viewed with the eye fixed on a single point. Therefore the conditions of foreshortening--or distorting the actual dimensions according to the angle from which they are seen--are governed by placing in harmony the distance of the eye from the scheme of the picture, the height of the eye in relation to the objects to be depicted, and the relative position of these objects with reference to the surface employed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II. PORTION OF A SCROLL BY KU K'AI-CHIH British Museum, London.]

But, in a.s.suming that the picture is viewed with the eye fixed on a single point, we put ourselves in conditions which are not those of nature. The European painter must therefore compromise with the exigencies of binocular vision, modify the too abrupt fading of forms and, in fine, evade over-exact principles. Thus he arrives at a _perspective de sentiment_, which is the one used by our masters.

Chinese perspective was formulated long before that of the Europeans and its origins are therefore different. It was evolved in an age when the method of superimposing different registers to indicate different planes was still being practiced in bas-reliefs. The succession of planes, one above the other, when codified, led to a system that was totally different from our monocular perspective. It resulted in a perspective as seen from a height. No account is taken of the habitual height of the eye in relation to the picture. The line of the horizon is placed very high, parallel lines, instead of joining at the horizon, remain parallel, and the different planes range one above the other in such a way that the glance embraces a vast s.p.a.ce. Under these conditions, the picture becomes either high and narrow--a hanging picture--to show the successive planes, or broad in the form of a scroll, unrolling to reveal an endless panorama. These are the two forms best known under their j.a.panese names of _kakemono_ and _makimono_.[2]

But the Chinese painter must attenuate the forms where they are parallel, give a natural appearance to their position on different levels and consider the degree of their reduction demanded by the various planes.

Even he must compromise with binocular vision and arrive at a _perspective de sentiment_ which, like our own, while scientifically false, is artistically true. To this linear perspective is added moreover an atmospheric perspective.

Having elected from a very early time to paint in monochrome, Chinese painters were led by the nature of this medium to seek to express atmospheric perspective by means of tone values and harmony of shading instead of by color. Thus they were familiar with chiaroscuro before the European painters. w.a.n.g Wei established the principles of atmospheric perspective in the eighth century. He explains how tints are graded, how the increasing thickness of layers of air deprives distant objects of their true coloring, subst.i.tuting a bluish tinge, and how forms become indistinct in proportion as their distance from the observer increases.

His testimony in this respect is similar to that of Leonardo da Vinci in his "Treatise on Painting."

[2] The Chinese terms are _Li Chou_ for a vertical painting and _Heng P'i_ for a horizontal painting.--TRANSLATOR.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III. KWANYIN. EIGHTH TO TENTH CENTURIES Painting brought from Tun-huang by the Pelliot Expedition.

The Louvre, Paris.]

III. DIVISION OF SUBJECTS

The Chinese divide the subjects of painting into four princ.i.p.al cla.s.ses, as follows:

Landscape.

Man and Objects.

Flowers and Birds.

Plants and Insects.

Nowhere do we see a predominant place a.s.signed to the drawing or painting of the human figure. This alone is sufficient to mark the wide difference between Chinese and European painting.

The exact name for _Landscape_ is translated by the words _mountain and water picture_. They recall the ancient conception of Creation on which the Oriental system of the world is founded. The mountain exemplifies the teeming life of the earth. It is threaded by veins wherein waters continuously flow. Cascades, brooks and torrents are the outward evidence of this inner travail. By its own superabundance of life, it brings forth clouds and arrays itself in mists, thus being a manifestation of the two principles which rule the life of the universe.

The second cla.s.s, _Man and Objects_, must be understood princ.i.p.ally as concerning man, his works, his belongings, and, in a general sense, all things created by the hand of man, in combination with landscape. This was the convention in early times when the first painters whose artistic purpose can be formulated with certainty, portrayed the history of the legendary beings of Taoism,--the genii and fairies dwelling amidst an imaginary Nature. The records tell us, to be sure, that the early masters painted portraits, but it was at a later period that _Man and Objects_ composed a cla.s.s distinct from _Landscape_, a period responsible for those ancestral portraits painted after death, which are almost always attributable to ordinary artisans. Earlier they endeavored to apply to figure painting the methods, technique and laws established for an ensemble in which the thought of nature predominated. Special rules bearing on this subject are sometimes found of a very early date but there is no indication that they were collected into a definite system until the end of the seventeenth century. Up to the present time our only knowledge of their content is through a small treatise published at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The third cla.s.s, _Flowers and Birds_, deals with those paintings wherein the Chinese gave rein to their fancy for painting the bird in conjunction with the plant life a.s.sociated with its home and habits. The bird is treated with a full understanding of its life, and flowers are studied with such a comprehension of their essential structure that a botanist can readily detect the characteristics typical of a species, despite the simplifications which an artist always imposes on the complexity of forms.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV. PALACE OF KIU CHENG-KUNG BY LI CHAO-TAO T'ang Period. Collection of V. Goloubew.]

This general cla.s.s is subdivided. The epidendrum, the iris, the orchis and the chrysanthemum became special studies each of which had its own masters, both from the standpoint of painting itself, and of the application of the aesthetic rules which govern this art. The bamboo and the plum tree are also allied to this cla.s.s. Under the influence of philosophic and symbolic ideas they furnished a special category of subjects to the imagination of the painter and form a division apart which has its own laws and methods, regarding which the Chinese treatises on Aesthetics inform us fully.

Finally, the fourth cla.s.s, _Plants and Insects_, is based upon the same conception as that of _Flowers and Birds_. The insect is represented with the plant which is his habitat when in the stage of caterpillar and larva, or flying above the flowers and plants upon which he subsists on reaching the stage of b.u.t.terfly and insect. Certain books add to this fourth cla.s.s a subdivision comprising fishes.