print | close Guide to Chinese Painting Reprinted from a brochure for the Douglas Dillon Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Together with the Astor Court*, the Douglas Dillon Galleries, devoted to Chinese arts of the past millennium, represent the first phase in the permanent reinstallation of the Metropolitan Museum's collections of Far Eastern art. Galleries for the exhibition of the arts of Japan, ancient China, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia are being planned.

Situated on the second floor of the Museum's north wing, the Dillon Galleries, which surround the Astor Chinese garden court and Ming furniture room on the south, east, and west, display mainly Chinese paintings of the Sung (960-1279), Yüan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and Ch'ing (1644-1911) dynasties. The Metropolitan's collection of Chinese paintings, one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the West, will be shown in these galleries on a rotating basis, along with important loans to the Museum. From time to time, special exhibitions presenting individual private collections or treating a particular theme will be installed.

To suggest broader artistic contexts, selected sculptures and objects of comparable periods are shown with the paintings. On view in the Ch'ing gallery, for example, are later Chinese jades from the Herbert R. Bishop Collection, which was donated to the Museum in 1902.

By the 11th century, scholar-officials had replaced China's hereditary aristocracy as the dominant force in government and culture. The scholar-official's favorite pastimes -- poetry, calligraphy, and painting -- became the principal forms of artistic expression. While narrative and historical paintings serving didactic and religious purposes played an important role in earlier pictorial traditions, landscapes and flower paintings predominated from the Sung dynasty on. As scholars turned increasingly to the cultivation and expression of the inner self, painting, calligraphy, and poetry functioned together in single works of self-expression in scholar painting of the Yüan and later periods.

Chinese calligraphy and painting, an infinitely rich and subtle field, can be better appreciated with an understanding of its various artistic formats:

The handscroll -- so called because it is unrolled by hand horizontally -- is unique to the Orient. Normally, it is unrolled from right to left and viewed only one section at a time (one end of the scroll is rolled up as the other end is unrolled). By manipulating the two ends of the scroll simultaneously, the viewer is free to move back and forth in the composition. By its very nature, therefore, the handscroll is an intimate art form to be read or perused by one or two persons at a time.

The ancient Chinese wrote on narrow strips of bamboo or wood that they tied together in rolled bundles. Later, silk or paper rolls were developed for inscribing long texts or Buddhist sutras and for representing frieze-like narrative or landscape illustrations. In landscape depictions, the composition may trace the course of a journey over time, or represent tours of an actual garden or city.

A typical handscroll, as represented by Ch'ien Hsüan's Wang Hsi-chih Watching Geese is mounted with a frontispiece at its right -- the beginning of the handscroll; sheets of colophons at its left provide a record of appreciative comments from generations of admirers. In this handscroll, the frontispiece, written by the Ch'ien-lung emperor (reigned 1736-95), reads: "A moment of quiet exhilaration at Shan-yin [where Wang Hsi-chih lived]"; 52 colophons by the emperor's courtiers and by later connoisseurs follow the painting.

Since the Song dynasty, vertical hanging scrolls such as T'ang Yin's Moon Goddess Ch'ang O have become the principal form of wall decoration in Chinese domestic architecture. Derived from wall paintings, banners, and screen paintings, hanging scrolls are executed on either silk (occasionally satin) or paper, then mounted with a backing of layers of paper. Borders of plain or figured silk are added to frame and protect the picture. Additional pieces of silk of different but harmonious colors and patterns may be placed above and below the border to lengthen the proportions of the scroll according to the scale of its surroundings. The scroll is hung by a cord attached to a thin stave at the top of the mounting. Two narrow vertical strips of fabric, often pasted on the uppermost section of the mounting, are vestiges of ornamental ribbons that once hung freely from early banners. The bottom of the scroll is affixed to a roller with protruding knobs, which are usually made of plain or elaborately carved ivory, stone, lacquer, or porcelain. As fine works of art, hanging scrolls, easily rolled up and stored, are changed frequently or viewed only on special occasions.

The hand-held silk fan was an important format for painting during the Song dynasty. These fans consist of pieces of silk stretched over a circular or oval frame strengthened by a central shaft that extends below the frame to form the handle. Often one side of the fan is decorated with a painting, the other inscribed with a poem amplifying the pictorial theme. It is a mark of the refinement and aesthetic preoccupation of the age that major artists were enlisted to paint these articles of daily use, for which members of the imperial family often inscribed the accompanying poems. When fans are mounted as album leaves by later collectors, the frame is removed, but a worn area, caused by its central shaft, is usually apparent along the fan's vertical axis; this abrasion can be seen in Hermitage by a Pine-Covered Bluff.

The folding fan, introduced into China from Japan, became especially fashionable during the Ming dynasty. The frame of the fan consists of narrow ribs, usually made of bamboo, which are gathered at one end and secured by a pin. Unfolded, the radiating ribs, resembling the spokes of a wheel, form a segment of a circle. Arcs of paper, often flecked with gold or silver leaf, are pasted to the front and back of the ribs so that when closed the width of the fan is that of a single fold. Butterfly Amid Bamboo, Flowers, and Rocks by Ch'en Hung-shou displays the coloristic effects possible with such papers. Favorite personal articles of the scholar, folding fans were painted and inscribed by the leading artists of the Ming and Ch'ing periods.

Fans and other forms of small-scale work, including calligraphy and artists' sketches, were often collected by the artist or by later connoisseurs and preserved in album form. The typical album is composed of a group of square or rectangular leaves mounted accordion style. Painters used the sequential images to capture different views of landscape or garden scenery, to create variations on a theme, or -- as with the masters of the early Ch'ing Orthodox School -- to survey and explore the relationships between the major Song and Yuan painting idioms. Working with groups of ten, twelve, twenty, or more leaves, the leading masters of the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties created ingenious programs in presenting related poetic, calligraphic, and pictorial images. An example is Ch'en Shun's album, a tour de force of Ming flower painting.

*See Alfreda Murck and Wen Fong, "A Chinese Garden Court: The Astor Court at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Winter 1980/81.

Recommended Websites

• A Look at Chinese Painting [Metropolitan Museum of Art]
(www.metmuseum.org/explore/Chinese/html_pages/elegant3.htm)
An online teaching resource about Chinese painting, calligraphy, handscrolls, hanging scrolls, albums, and fans illustrated with examples from the museum's collection. Includes a glossary of key terms.

• Chinese Painting [A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization]
(depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4ptgintr.htm)
Examines two distinct aspects of painting as seen in the Song and Yuan dynasties: painting as social record, and painting as fine art. Also discusses the technical aspects of painting that developed during this time.