NOTES AND QUERIES 2 05 



many authorities whom space does not allow me to quote. The re- 

 petition of his error in the second edition of Pictorial Art by Dr. Giles 

 will not help to correct it." 



Dr. Ferguson's reply seems conclusive. Dr. Giles is quite right in 

 saying that I produced no authority. I had none literary to give : 

 but I relied on the practical opinion of an artist, one of the most 

 famous calligraphists, living. He had no hesitation in saying that the 

 term referred to lines drawn on the paper to help exact measurements. 



This opinion I now confirm by a quotation from the ^ 3$C Hr iJ 2| ftf 

 which is amply authoritative and explicit. 



m «s m m # u # ■* & si m i*j ^ fr m mmmm w * « ¥ 



XMMR » fill - .H # S ± &. 



'Jao Tzu-jan of the Sung, wrote an essay on 12 faults to be avoided 

 in painting. The 10th point dealt with the confusion in the insertion 

 of buildings in a picture. He said, that though Chieh Hua is a 

 minor or special study yet in the painting of complicated buildings, in 

 a small space, in order to have proper shading, perspective, and exact 

 relations, you cannot do without the rule and pencil, i.e. Chieh Hua. 

 This is a difficult subject. 



The insertion of a house or two into landscape may be done by 

 free hand, and though you don't actually use the foot-rule yet the 

 method here too is that of Chieh Hua.' 



But it may be possible that the technical term has other meanings 

 too. Without desiring to be dogmatic I suggest a further one. 

 And the clue was suggested to me from a sentence in the biography of 

 Wang Chen P'eng ( ^ 3£ || ). It reads as follows ^ U ft If H H 

 7$ Wz M M Mt^WJ^ffiiffiffi • ^his evidently does not so much refer 

 to landscape with buildings, which require exact measurements, as to 

 work of the imagination, and directly contradicts Dr. Giles' idea of 

 "putting a landscape into a given space as opposed to the artist 

 letting his fancy run on." The idea seems to be that the painter was 

 very efficient in drawing the dividing lines of light and dark : he was 

 very clever in merging the Yin and Yang : the merging borders 

 and defining lines would thus be expressed by j^lH. The correspond- 

 ing term in English would be the word chiaroscuro : but possibly 

 with the difference that the Chinese would look more to the separating 

 lines where the light and shade merged, and the English term looks 

 rather to the general view and effect. 



