132 
House & Garden 
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The B ird -an d -F lower Paintings of China 
{Continued from page 130) 
graphy, and not, as with us, as an in¬ 
dependent art, sister to sculpture and 
architecture. This important fact must 
be borne in mind in any consideration, 
even the slightest, of Chinese painting. 
Classical Chinese painters were, above 
all things “literary.” The Chinese 
painter sought to convey through his 
brush stroke some hint, suggestion, or 
invitation to seek the inner meaning, 
the soul of things. His, indeed, was a 
subjective art, as opposed to our own 
occidental objective art, or the art 
which seeks to convey to the spectator 
the illusion of nature’s external appear¬ 
ances. Such realism for its own sake 
alone Chinese painters took into little 
account. The pictographs which were 
forerunners of the ideographs and the 
final phonograms forming the characters 
of the monosyllabic Chinese written 
language suggest the connecting link in 
the Chinese mind between painting and 
calligraphy. The Oriental mind de¬ 
manded that fine thoughts be dignified 
by expression in fine writing, and calli¬ 
graphers came to vie with one another 
in their desire to produce expressive 
brush strokes leading to that marvel¬ 
ous Chinese writing whose subtleties are 
never, perhaps, fully to he compre¬ 
hended by the Western mind, no matter 
what enthusiasm the occidental may 
hold for the orient. Indeed, to under¬ 
stand Chinese art at all, one must be 
capable of a certain detachment from 
our own occidental cultural ideas and 
seek to see things through the eyes of 
Chinese philosophy. 
EARLY NATURE STUDIES 
The Chinese painters of the earlier 
period devoted themselves to the study 
of Nature. Such were the artists of the 
T’ang Dynasty (A. D. 618-607) and of 
the Five Dynasties of latter Liang, Tang, 
Chiu, Han and Chou (907-960), who 
found great inspiration in the example 
of Ouan Mu Ch’i, painter, poet and 
musician, whose precepts led the Eighth 
and the Ninth Century Chinese paint¬ 
ers to court nature. The Sung Dynasty 
which followed (Northern Sung:960- 
1127 ; Southern Sung 1127 - 1280 ) 
was also a golden age in Chinese art. 
But in succeeding dynasties the admira¬ 
tion of their artists for the works of 
the masters who had preceded them 
and whom they, in a manner, wor¬ 
shipped, led to their adopting a some¬ 
what imitative style. This very devo¬ 
tion to the style of the earlier masters 
caused the later Chinese painters to de¬ 
pend too much on their manner, and 
forgetting their precepts, they them¬ 
selves began to neglect somewhat that 
intensive study of Nature which had 
brought their predecessors to the pin¬ 
nacle of accomplishment. But so it 
is with the art of any land. 
Jn Kuo Hsi’s treatise on painting we 
find written: “Those who study flower 
painting take a single stalk and put it 
into a deep receptacle, and then examine 
it from above, thus seeing it from all 
points of view. Those who study bam¬ 
boo painting take a stalk of bamboo 
and on a moonlight night project its 
shadow on a piece of white silk on a 
wall; the true form of the bamboo is 
thus brought out. It is the same with 
landscape painting. The artist must 
place himself in communion with his 
hills and with his streams.” I do not 
mean to say that all artists after 
Sung forgot nature, but art after 
that period suffered a decline that 
suggests that imitation and extreme 
artificialities came to crowd the more 
spiritual works of the earlier Chinese 
masters. It was after Sung that spe¬ 
cialization came to he so systematized; 
one artist confined himself to some 
phase of snow effects, another to cy¬ 
presses, another to bamboos, still an¬ 
other to trees bending under a weight 
of snow, and so on. The famous Li Ti 
bent his energies to the delineation of 
bullfinches, bamboos and rocks, while 
Chong Jen gave himself to delineating 
plum branches in blossom. 
THE DECADENCE 
By the time we reach the Mongol¬ 
ian dynasty of Yuan (1368-1644), Chi¬ 
nese painting entered well upon its de¬ 
cline. From 1368 to 1488 Chinese 
painting was, as an English critic has 
put it, “Without great eminence, but 
without decay.” The substitution of 
imitation of the earlier masters for the 
earlier direct study of nature was, of 
course, responsible for this decadence 
from 1488 onward. This reminds one of 
Su Tung-p’o’s saying that “To copy the 
masterpieces of antiquity is only to 
grovel among the dust and husks.” 
In the reign of the Emperor Yung 
Ching (1723-1726) some improvement 
in art is to be noted, but it was not 
far-reaching We must remember that 
Chinese landscape art anticipates that of 
Europe by several centuries. Of their 
figure studies Anderson aptly remarks: 
“Although their work was often rich in 
vigour and expression, they certainly 
fell immeasurably below the Greeks; 
but to counterbalance this defect, no 
other artists, except those of Japan, 
have ever infused into delineations of 
bird life one tithe of the vitality and 
action to be seen in the Chinese por¬ 
traitures of the crow, the sparrow, the 
crane, and a hundred other varieties of 
the feathered race. In flowers the Chi¬ 
nese were less successful, owing to the 
absence of true chiaroscuro, but they 
were able to evolve a better picture of 
a single spray of blossoms than many 
a Western painter from all the trea¬ 
sures of a conservatory.” Even Ander¬ 
son does not here appear to be able to 
detach himself from the occidental 
viewpoint and thoroughly to under¬ 
stand the Hua niao paintings of the 
Chinese artists he nevertheless so greatly 
venerates. 
NATURE LEGENDS 
The group formed by the Bird-and- 
Flower paintings of China constitute 
as distinct a division of pictorial art 
as did the dining room fruit pieces of 
the glorious mid-Victorian period, or 
the flower pieces of the Dutch masters 
of bygone centuries. In China the popu¬ 
larity of the Hua niao subjects was 
very great, and perhaps no people the 
world over has been more passionately 
fond of bird study and of flower study 
than has the Chinese, a love only 
equalled by that of the Japanese. For 
the Chinese, every flower holds special 
significance, every bird suggests to the 
Chinese mind some legend, some illu¬ 
sion, some poetic association. These 
Bird-and-Flower paintings, attractive 
and decorative as they appear to occi¬ 
dental eyes, carry with them an inner 
meaning that naturally would escape 
the knowledge of any but the oriental 
versed in the lore of his land, the po¬ 
etry of his province. A painting of a red 
cockatoo needs for its fuller appreciation 
a knowledge of the famous Chinese 
poem of that name written by Po 
Chii-i who lived A. D. 772-846 (T'ang 
Dynasty), a poem admirably translated 
by Arthur Waley in his “170 Chinese 
Poems” as follows: 
“Sent as a present from Annam— 
A red cockatoo. 
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom, 
Speaking with the speech of men. 
(Continued on page 134) 
