Chinese Painters | Page 5

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. Wang 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, substituting 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 Hêng P'i
for a horizontal painting.--TRANSLATOR.
[Illustration: 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 principal classes,
as follows:
Landscape. Man and Objects. Flowers and Birds. Plants and Insects.
Nowhere do we see a predominant place assigned 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 class, Man and Objects, must be understood principally 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 class 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 class, 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 associated 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.
[Illustration: PLATE IV. PALACE OF KIU CHENG-KUNG BY LI

CHAO-TAO T'ang Period. Collection of V. Goloubew.]
This general class 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 class. 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 class, 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 butterfly and insect. Certain books add