Chinese Painters | Page 4

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.
[Illustration: 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 Japanese 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 space.
The practice of drawing and painting offers the student the following
problem in descriptive geometry: to represent the three dimensions of
space by means of a plane surface of two dimensions. The Egyptians
and Assyrians 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 assumed
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.
[Illustration: PLATE II. PORTION OF A SCROLL BY KU
K'AI-CHIH British Museum, London.]
But, in assuming 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 space. 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 Japanese
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