Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/44098

Cover Page

The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/44098 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation

Author: Wenxin Wang

Title: A social history of painting inscriptions in Ming China (1368-1644)

Issue Date: 2016-10-26

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Chapter 5 Portrait Inscriptions and Re-Inscriptions: “The Decaying Brushstrokes Are Where Your Spirits

Rest”

The word chuan in Xie Chengju’s poem, cited in the introduction to this dissertation, demonstrates that Ming painting inscriptions not only addressed issues of the present, but also issues of the past and the future. This chapter adds the dimension of time to the social history of painting inscriptions, vis-a-vis time that was conceptually and socially meaningful to the Ming people.

The first part of this chapter focuses on a specific genre of Chinese panting: portraiture. It is concerned with portrait inscriptions as a significant device for mediating portrait inscribers and social interactions and a device enabling the inscribers to reproduce themselves for identity construction. This part also investigates portrait inscriptions as texts that, being independent from the portraits, had their way of multiplication and circulation. The previous discussions on inscriptions in manuscripts and printing books prepared the foundations for understanding portrait inscriptions in this context.

Portraiture was not the only situation that frequently invited Ming people to ponder the relationship between their inscriptions and a changing environment. The second part of this chapter deals with the idea of re-encountering a painting (including a portrait) that one had once painted, viewed, inscribed or owned, or a painting that had carried many inscriptions by people in the past. It is concerned with, in this situation, how inscriptions projected the presence of the inscriber as an extension of his physical existence, so as to intervene with the past, present, and future. These directions of time envision a social history in a time continuum in which events occur in succession.

1 For a conceptual discussion of the Chinese notion of time, see Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368-1644 (London: Reaktion, 2007), 21-26.

Portrait Inscriptions: The Exploration of a Changing Environment

Attempts to seek parallels between Chinese and Western portraiture are often frustrated.

Western portraiture is about painting a likeness of an individual based on the artist’s observations. In comparison, Chinese portraiture is lack of chiaroscuro technique, anatomical analysis and interest in individual characteristics. These characteristics often make art historians consider Chinese portraits are mediocre and boring.

In contrast to the abundant scholarship on Western portraiture, there is a dearth of studies on Chinese portraiture both in and outside China. There has even been great hesitation about including Chinese portraits in the category of “art”.

A popular scheme is to see the Ming era as a period of “decline and revival.”

This scheme attributes the decline to the dominant scholar artists’

ignorance of the genre, and the revival to the introduction of Western techniques to China by early Jesuits in the late sixteenth century.

Imperial portraiture is closely linked to high court art in general and rulership.

The educated men’s involvement in portraiture is somehow dismissed. Even their role as patrons is barely discussed. Their portraits are put in the context of Chinese ancestral cult, and the context, in a way of circle reasoning, in

2 Seeking for “individual irregularities of an empirical person” (page 23) from the early history of Chinese portraiture is a main thread of Dietrich Seckel’s essay “The Rise of Portraiture in Chinese Art,” Artibus Asiae, Vol. 53, No. 1/2 (1993): 7-26.

3 For such ideas, see Sherman E. Lee, “Varieties of Portraiture in Chinese and Japanese Art,” The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. 64 (April 1977): 118-36.

4 Sherman E. Lee, “Varieties of Portraiture in Chinese and Japanese Art,” 118-9; Joan Hornby, “Chinese Ancestral Portraits: Some Late Ming and Ming Style Ancestral Portraits in Scandinavian Museums,” Bulletin of Far Eastern Antiquities, Vol. 70 (2000):

173-271.

5 A clear demonstration of these views can be found in Eli Lancman, Chinese Portraiture (Tokyo: Rutland, Vermont, 1960), 133-74.

6 For studies on Chinese imperial portraiture, see Wen Fong, “Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods,” Art Orientalis, Vol. 25 (1995):

47-58; Dora C. Y. Ching, “Icons of Rulership: Imperial Portraiture during the Ming Dynasty,” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011). Sherman E. Lee’s article in note 2 also investigates several portraits from Qing court.

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turn support these portraits being made as iconic reminders of forebears.

The bias against Chinese portraiture has been reduced in recent decades by the increasing realization that the notion of

“portrait” can be different in different societies. Suspending the dispute on artistry, scholarship has discovered more facets of ancient Chinese portraiture: ritual, political, religious, commemorative, as well as a conceptual result of cosmos and human being. But portraits are seldom situated in concrete social circumstances as objects that can be touched, examined, carried, altered, repaired and even destroyed. The importance of such physical interactions with portraits to this present study is that they direct us to investigate the “thingness” of portraits. This thingness, in turn, illuminates the thingness of inscriptions. To some extent, portrait inscriptions encompass many of the topics that have been discussed in the previous chapters: the physicality of inscriptions, personal networking, self-identity, the two ways of preserving and disseminating inscriptions.

It should be noted at the outset that the terminology of portraiture in Chinese writings of all periods is extremely inconsistent. More than thirty words refer to this genre of painting.

The terminological ambivalence reminds us that portraiture is not distinct from figure paintings. This chapter tackles portrait inscriptions for analysis of the social aspect of these inscriptions and paintings. Paintings of imaginary and historical figures are not within the scope of this investigation.

Before we begin our exploration of portrait inscriptions, a brief introduction to the general situation of portraiture and portraitists is worthwhile. “Keys to Painting a Portrait” (Xiexiang

is a short guide to the skills necessary for rendering a portrait.

7　Li Chu-tsing and James C. Y. Wyatt, The Chinese Scholar's Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period: An Exhibition from the Shanghai Museum (New York:

Thames and Hudson, 1987), 116.

8　For a relatively thorough sorting out of these terms and their historical change, see Dora C. Y. Ching, “Icons of Rulership,” 29-42.

This essay prefigured a growing interest in producing human portraiture. The growth in demand for the visual instruction of portraiture continued throughout the Ming period. The eagerness for portraiture since the late sixteenth century can be attested to by the larger number of portraits produced in this period, as well as a number of published books. Wang Yi’s essay partially survives by virtue of several printed encyclopaedias of the Ming era, which embraced the essay to instruct their audience.

A late Ming encyclopaedia, Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms (Sancai tuhui 三才圖會 , 1609), used rich and delicate illustrations to teach the reader about modelling the human face and body with a series of illustrations of faces seen from different angles (fig. 5-1). Perhaps in part because of these kinds of model books, for the first time in Chinese history, Ming portraitists grasped the method of representing human faces frontally.

Collected

9 For Wang Yi’s essay and research on it, see Ogawa Yōichi, “Minshin no shōzō ga to ninsōjutsu – Minshin shōsetsu kenkyū no ikkan toshite” 明清の肖像画と 人 相 術―― 明清小説研究の一環として ――, Touhokudaigaku chūgokugo gaku bungaku ronshū 東北大学中国語学文学論集 , No. 4 (1999), accessed December 24, 2015, http://www.sal.tohoku.ac.jp/zhongwen/journal/04/04ogawa.htm.

10 For the development of portraits in this respect, see Wen Fong, “Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods,” 47-58.

Fig. 5-1 Illustrations of depictions of human faces from different angles, in Wang Qi, Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms, juan renshi 人 事 4, 29a-30a. First published in 1607, Huaiyin caotang 槐 陰 草 堂 edition.

Source: Bayerische StaatsBibliothek.

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Illustrations of the Three Realms also instructs on representing the

human body in different postures and scenarios, such as a man playing a zither or a man served by an attendant inscribing on a wall. These teachings would have been very useful for those at that time for those seeking for ready templates for their own creations.

Ming clients of portraiture enjoyed a variety of choices. One could hire a professional portraitist to come to his home, or ask a competent friend to paint the picture as a favour, or simply go to portrait studios in person (fig. 5-2). A Record of Ming Painting (Minghua lu 明 畫 錄 ), a biographical book of Ming artists completed in 1677, impressively recorded 90 Ming figurative painters. Many of them would have accepted commissions for portraits in their days.

It has been widely acknowledged that the increase in urban residents and commercialization contributed to the growth of portraiture. Demand for portraiture remained at a high level, especially in cities, from the fifteenth century till the

Fig. 5-2 Detail of a portraitist working at his own studio upon the client’s visit, from Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, 17

century.

11 There are 74 entries. A painter’s descendant who was also successful at figure painting would appear in the same entry with his ancestor. See Xu Qin, Ming hua lu, 6-7.

last years of the Ming dynasty.

A popular witicism summarises the huge contrast in the incomes of painters of different specialities: “ [Painting] portraiture for gold, flowers for silver.

Whoever wants to beg will paint hills and rivers. 金臉銀花卉 , 要 討 飯 畫 山 水 .”

The high reward for portraiture may well have been particularly salient in commercially prosperous cities like Yangzhou, where this saying was recorded. Those who painted for monetary payment were mostly professional portraitists. For this painter group, apprenticeship was a standard way for a beginner to learn basic skills and for the organisation of a studio.

Extant Ming portraits lack inscriptions written by professional portraitists. But this phenomenon does not necessarily mean they were too humble to interact with their clients. Portrait inscriptions occasionally acknowledged their names and native places, such as “Mr. Tang 唐 from Yin 鄞 (a

廣 陵 (modern Yangzhou).”

When a late Ming official Kang Guoxiang 康 國 相 found his portraitist in low spirits, he even played instruments to entertain the painter.

Like the problem outlining the readership of Chinese books, it is not easy to demarcate a high-end and a low-end to portraitists and their market. An official could hire portraitists of various educational levels. A literate but unemployed man could paint for a barely literate merchant. Different combinations of commissioners and portraitists assigned different value to the final portrait works and the inscriptions that accompanied these portraits.

It is true that Chinese portraits were much less about the public manifestation of affluence. But they did assume intensive functionalities in the political, social, ritual and ideological

12 For portraiture and the apprenticeship among urban professional portraitists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China, see Yu Hui, “Shiqiba shiji de shimin xiaoxiang hua” 十七、八世紀的市民肖像畫 , Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 故宮博物院院刊, Vol. 95, No. 3 (2001): 38-41.

13 Wang Yun 汪鋆 (b.1816), Yangzhou huayuan lu 揚州畫苑錄 , XXSKQS, 657.

14 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao 明 人 自 傳 文 鈔 (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1977), 285, 93.

15 Ibid., 215.

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domains. The problem is that the highly stylized Chinese portraiture provided the beholder with almost no information about their creation, usage, and reception. In this section, I will show that inscriptions, the majority of which can only be found in the individual collections of the writers, provide us with an avenue to approach the social facet of Chinese portraiture. They illuminate the social circumstances in which portraits were executed and circulated, and assumed social functions on their own.

Genres of Portrait Inscriptions

The lack of inscriptions on Ming portraits could be a result of the fact that a considerable proportion of them assumed ritual functions that had little need for any written words. Another possible reason is that some once existing inscriptions might have been removed from the portraits in the course of their distribution and transmission. But we do observe a tendency for Ming educated men to depend on texts to draw information from the portraits they were examining. In turn, from time to time they felt an obligation to provide texts for opaque portraits in order to aid the future viewer’s comprehension. Masaaki Itakura’s study on a late Yuan “small portrait” (xiaoxiang 小 像 ) of Ni Zan by an anonymous painter gives us insight in this regard.

This portrait handscroll depicts a Ni Zan image sitting before a screen. The picture part is followed by a colophon written by Ni’s close friend Zhang Yu 張 雨 (1283-1350), eulogizing Ni’s virtue.

On a late Ming copy attributed to Qiu Ying, this composition changes. The screen disappears; in the same place above Ni Zan’s head is a text written in rectangular shape (fig. 5-3). The text is an epitaph

16 Masaaki Itakura, “Chōu dai Geisan (Taipei kokyū hakubutsuin) o meguru shomondai” 張雨題『倪瓉像』（台北故宮博物院）をめぐる諸問題 , Bijutsushi ronsō 美術史論叢 , No. 17 (2001): 159-86.

17 For Zhang Yu’s biography, see Chang Kuang-p’in, “Yuan xuanru Zhang Yu shengping ji shufa” 元玄儒張雨生平及書法 , in Zhonghua minguo jianguo bashi nian Zhongguo yishu wenwu taolun hui lunwenji 中華民國建國八十年中國藝術文物 討論會論文集, Vol. shuhua shang 書畫上 (Taipei: Gugong bowuyuan, 1991), 239- 78.

Fig. 5-2 Detail of a portraitist working at his own studio upon the client’s visit, from Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, 17^th century.

composed by a scholar named Wang Bin 王 賓 (ca.1335-1405), which mentions that Ni Zan gave Zhang Yu a large amount of money after selling some land. Itakura argues that Ming people found this epitaph, which explicit narrates the friendship between Ni and Zhang, a more appropriate text to be inscribed on the copy than Zhang’s colophon.

The epitaph was a genre of inscriptions associated with portraits, along with verse genres such as poetry, ci-poetry, sanqu 散 曲 (a form of literary lyrics), and non-verse genres such as biography and ji 記 (record). A particularly noteworthy genre is zan 讚 , or eulogy. This early literary genre was developed to describe and comment on people or things. Recent studies believe that writings of this genre were widely used on sacrifice rituals, or when a gift was presented, or when a guest was introduced to the host. Eulogies for paintings, as mentioned in chapter 1, emerged in early ancient China. The eulogies of this kind served to explain visual contents, and to assistant the viewers’ comprehension.

These functions met with the needs of Ming people, who were

often expected, or requested, to write a literary text for a portrait

subject. This form of writing should be solemn. It was normally

positive, lavishing praise on the subject’s exploits and merits, and

linking these admirable aspects to his or her physiognomic traits

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that can be told by the portrait.

It is hence not surprising that Chinese Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries adopted zan for their inscriptions on images of Jesus and Mary.

Ming poems on paintings, though criticized for mediocrity in terms of their literary value, nonetheless received some attention from academia. In contrast, portraiture eulogies are seldom studied. Literary specialists tag portrait eulogies as writings with a low level of literariness and therefore see no value in studying these texts. Art historians are also not motivated to study them due to the fact that existing portraiture seldom carries eulogies, or even inscriptions in general. Ogawa Yōichi is one of a very few scholars who shed light on the eulogy genre of portraiture. He terms all sorts of literature generated for or related to portraiture as “portraiture literature” (shōzōga no bungaku 肖 像 画 の 文 学 ), ranging from novels, dramas, jokes, to poems (tixiang shi 題 像 詩 ), ci-poems, and eulogies (xiangzan 像 讚 ).

Ogawa has noticed the existence of a large number of portrait eulogies in literary corpuses of the Ming and Qing periods and believes that these writings, which should be read simultaneously to the appreciation of portraiture, lost this context when they ended up in textual collections.

I would argue, however, that despite their physical separation from the portraits, eulogies and other genres of inscriptions do not lose their social functions, but continue to

18 Many studies have discussed the relationship between Chinese portraiture and physiognomy. See Ogawa Yōichi, “Minshin no shōzō ga to ninsōjutsu.”

Richard Vinograd, The Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5-6. For a discussion from a cultural perspective, see Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 88-91.

19 Ad Dudink cites five eulogies that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century.

Their attribution to Xu Guangqi seems problematic. Another two on Jesus and Mary should not be attributed to Xu but rather to unknown writers of the same time or after. See Ad Dudink, “Chapter Three The Image of Xu Guangqi as Author of Christian Texts (A Bibliographical Appraisal,” in Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), ed. Catherine Jami, Peter Mark Engelfriet, and Gregory Blue (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 99-152.

20 Ogawa Yōichi, Chūgoku no shōzōga no bungaku 中 国 の 肖 像 画 文 学 (Tokyo:

kenbun shuppan, 2005), 14.

21 Ibid., 130-32.

spread social meanings. In the following discussion, I will situate the execution and circulation of portrait inscriptions, many of which are eulogies, in an everyday scenario, with the aim of highlighting their social value, something that has largely been ignored in previous studies.

Interactions with Social Identities

Portrait inscriptions primarily deal with the sitters as human beings in society. This is particularly true when the portrait depicts a group, in which one subject’s social attribute is illuminated by his or her relations to the others. In the Ming context, one type of inscription for group portraits related to the basic unit of society – a family or a clan. Jiaqing tu 家 慶 圖 , lit.,

“picture of the celebration of a clan,” is the term for this kind of portrait. It depicts a clan, mostly of more than two generations, gathering together for festivals or events. This kind of painting helps a clan’s descendants to know their communal ancestors and genealogy. The underlying didactic message was that continuous reproduction represented the endless prosperity of a lineage.

It is not surprising that an outsider to the clan, or any remote descendant, who gazes at a group portrait, naturally wants to identify each figure and to work out the various relationships.

Inscriptions often assumed this task, devoting space to identifying each figure and describing the entire genealogy. The inscriptions treated the clan as a basic unit, the members of which were closely linked. They were far less concerned with revealing each figure’s individual traits. Readers who relied on the information embodied in these inscriptions could hopefully avoid any confusion about the sitter’s identity, relations, and social standing and, thus, avoid any improper behaviour or remark.

The person who presented an inscription for a clan

celebration picture could well have been a member of the clan

himself. Such an individual would have been literate and,

furthermore, be a respected and authoritative figure. It was he

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(seldom she) who supplied the audience of the picture and the inscription with an authoritative narrative of his clan composition and history.

A late-Ming scholar official Wu Zhongxing 吳中行 (fl.1571-1588) had such an inscription for his lineage created in the record genre. The beginning of the record reads:

I begged for leave in 1585. Until now, the year of 1588, it has been three years. I already exceeded my official time limit, but I am as sick as before. I am unable to return and serve the court. Also I do not dare to submit a memorial to the throne with a request to retire. […] It just happens that Mr. Li Zhishan from Jingxi is good at portraying people, so he has done my portrait. There were many people that painted my portrait before. But none of them was lifelike. [Mr. Li’s portrait] catches my appearance to the extent of fifty or sixty percent. Therefore I told him to add portraits of my sons and grandsons. The accuracy in their figures is eighty to ninety percent, and thereby is the image complete. I thus write some words to make the date.

Unlike ancestor portraiture, clan-gathering pictures are only painted of living people. Therefore they are emphatically about the moment. The author of the above inscription, Wu Zhongxing, devoted a lot of space in the above record to introducing the names, age, and personalities of his clan members who appeared on the portrait. His elaborate introduction even covered those who were not present on the picture, his daughter and that daughter’s mother “who believed that [as female] their faces should not be exposed to the public.” Wu Zhongxing was the only successful metropolitan graduate of his clan. His source of authority in introducing the clan no doubt rested in this crucial

22 To this end, family portraiture and inscriptions played a similar role like genealogies. For the social production of genealogy in the Qing and Republican periods, see Xu Xiaoman, “‘Preserving the Bonds of Kin’ Genealogy Masters and Genealogy Production in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Area in the Qing and Republican Periods,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, 332-67.

23 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 83-84.

success, which happened in 1571. Wu once had a promising official career. But in 1577, he disputed the decision of Zhang Juzheng 張 居 正 (1525-1582), the then Grand Secretary, not to relinquish his governmental duty to mourn his father’s death. To supress his argument, he was severely flogged, and almost died for this severe corporal punishment.

He then lived a semi-retired and semi-exiled life back home.

Although his career was ruined, Wu became famous nationwide for his courage in opposing the most powerful person in officialdom. But since Zhang Juzheng was the chief examiner in 1571, Wu was also controversial for opposing his teacher. His inscription reveals little about himself and his past: there were no words about the inscriber’s bitter history, except for a few ambiguous remarks that the past was like a big dream that had already blurred.

But the inscription did relate to the past of the clan as a whole. Wu expresses regret in the text that his dead parents had not left behind a portrait, by which he can mourn them.

At the end of his inscription, Wu doubts if the picture is an object that enables him to transmit his visual appearance to the posterity, and if the picture is whereby his posterity can “rest their remembrance” (suo tuo yi si 所托以思 ) of him.

His words make it clear that both the portrait and the inscription were intended to be viewed and treasured by the descendants of the Wu clan. These descendants, some of them were even yet to exist when Wu Zhongxing created his record, were closely linked to their ancestors by virtue of Wu’s writing. Like Suzhou literati who employed inscriptions to create a sense of community, Wu employed inscription to unite his clan, the basic cross- generational unit in Ming society. He thus created a bridge between his clan in the moment and the future.

24 For Zhang Juzheng and the uproar caused by his reluctance to leave the office, see Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, The Cambridge History of China Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, Part 1: 1368–1644 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 526-67.

25 For Wu Zhongxing’s biography, see Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi 明史 , SKQS edition, juan 299, 10a-11b; DMB, 138.

26 Tu Lianjie ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 84.

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It was not uncommon to ask someone outside the clan, in most cases a distinguished person, to preface or record a clan portrait.

Song Lian 宋 濂 (1310-1381), a renowned early Ming official and writer, wrote such a record, in which he identified the painted figure with remarkable patience. He carefully pointed out to any potential reader that “[…] five men wearing caps stood behind with a young servant are the grandsons. Two children walking slowly with albums while speaking to themselves are the great grandsons.”

He also described each sitter’s position in the clan hierarchy. Anyone simultaneously reading his inscription and viewing the portrait is saved from making any mistakes or causing any offence with respect to the senior-junior relationships represented in the portrait.

What is more important in Song Lian’s writing is the information it preserves regarding the social aspects of the portrait. According to Song Lian, the painted clan was his town fellows. Among them was a long-lived dowager, who was still a healthy ninety-one-year-old woman. A martial officer of the local county commissioned the portrait in honour of the longevity and harmony of the clan. He then approached Song Lian for an inscription. In terms of social writings, Robert Hymes has argued that the connection between an author and the commissioner continued to exist when the writing was put into the former’s collected writings.

In this vein, Song’s record enabled the official and the painted clan to establish a connection with him, and the connection persisted by means of entering into his individual collection, or being included in the collection of someone else.

The inscription not only addressed issues within a clan, it reached people who had associations with the clan, and probably spoke to all members of a local community.

Ming portraits could also depict a group of non-related

27 Song Lian, “Jiaqing tu ji” 家慶圖記 , in Wenzhang bianti huixuan 文章辨體彙選 , comp. He Fuzheng 贺复徵 , juan 584, SKQS edition, 14a-15b.

28 See Robert Hymes, “Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy in Sung and Yuan Fu-chou,” in Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000- 1940, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and James L. Watson (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 95-136.

people. Whereas paintings of elegant gatherings situate figures in a vast landscape in order to indicate the intimate interaction between human beings and nature, group portraits have an intrinsically different emphasis on the relations between humans.

Venerable Friends (Shangyou tu 尚 友 圖 , fig. 5-4) is one example

executed by the late Ming scholar-painter Xiang Shengmo 項圣謨 (1597-1658) in collaboration with a professional portraitist Zhang Qi 張琦 (fl. 17

cent.). Zhang Qi was a student of another popular portraitist Xie Bin 謝 彬 (1601-1681). Both men were followers of Zeng Jing 曾 鲸 (ca.1564-ca.1667), the most successful late Ming portraitist. Unlike the paintings commemorating “Apricot Garden Gathering” once held in Beijing, Venerable Friends is not a representation of an actual assemblage. It was painted in 1652, by which time most of the figures in the picture had passed away. The portrait is thus a retrospective commemoration of a generation of social elite that Xiang Shengmo had associations and friendships with.

Xiang Shengmo who had conceived this portrait project created a lengthy prose inscribed on the upper part of the picture.

A noteworthy feature of this inscription is that the author does not dedicate space to praising the social status and achievements of the painted figures. Alternatively, he describes each figure’s clothing in detail. Dong Xichang is pictured wearing “a cap of Jin [Dynasty] style and clothing made of creeping fig.” Chen Jiru has

“a Blue horn-cap and brown garment.” Li Rihua wears “a cap of Tang Dynasty style and coarse clothes.” Lu Deizhi has “a [Tao]

Yuanming cap, looking like a sick crane,” and Xiang himself is depicted with a “Grand horn-cap and plain garment.” Only Monk Zhixuan’s clothing is not described, since his Buddhist dress is easily recognized. In the late Ming, there was fashion for revitalizing ancient dress style.

This portrait and the inscription are a reflection of this fashion. Moreover, the inscription’s

29 For a discussion of the date and nature of Venerable Friends, and comparison of three extant copies, see Chu-tsing Li and James C.Y. Watt ed., The Chinese Scholar’s Studio, 143; see also Chu-tsing Li, “Xiang Shengmo de ‘Shangyou tu’”, 55-60.

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Fig. 5-4 Xiang Shengmo and Zhang Qi, Venerable Friends, 1652, ink and colour on paper, hanging scroll, 38.1 x 22.5 cm, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai. Source: Chu-tsing Li and James C.Y. Watt, eds, The Chinese

emphasis on a the unified external appearance and manner of the sitters suggests a shared taste among this small homogeneous community. Thus, the inscription somehow erases the issue of social distinction, which certainly existed among these scholars.

Another important point regarding the painstaking descriptions

of the costumes is the strong sense of nostalgia, directing the

reader to the past, a time when the most eminent scholars in

Jiaxing area enjoyed leisurely lives in fashionable clothes. Even

though the past was inevitably lost due to war and death, the painted figures could live on in the portraits, with their costumes and gestures remaining in a perfect harmony.

Xiang Shengmo’s inscription on Venerable Friends offers an example of the enthusiasm for clothing but with no intention of making a social distinction. This indifference to social status was a projected gesture with a specific purpose. The Ming society was sensitive to costume. The founder of the Ming dynasty, Emperor Hongwu, issued over one hundred edicts to regulate clothing during his thirty-year reign.

The emperor’s goal was to visually distinguish the four basic strata – shi (gentry), farmers, artisans, and merchants – through their dress. The emperor even personally designed costumes for his ministers, costumes that varied according to rank and varied in colours, textile patterns, hats, materials for belts and their tablets (hu 笏 ).

The emperor’s vision was presumably that from a glimpse of a person on the street, one could quickly identify the individual’s social status, and react properly to the person without violating the behaviour code. Unsurprisingly, to a fifteenth-century viewer, the discrepancy of Wang Zhi’s clothing in the two extant versions of Gathering in the Apricot Garden would have been easily detectable.

A distinction in clothing was intrinsically a distinction in social status. A well-mannered Ming person should visualize his status through clothing, and use appropriate appellation and social etiquette towards other people whose status was likewise discernible from clothing.

Ming officials at the top of social hierarchy were particularly eager to visualize their status by having their images in official robes painted. They also exhibited a strong interest in reinforcing this visuality by writing

30 Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua: wan Ming de xiaofei shehui yu shidafu 品味奢華：晚 明的消費社會與士大夫(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2008), 127-30.

31 Ibid., 123-24.

32 Guo Zhengyu 郭正域 (154-1612), Huang Ming dianli zhi 皇明典禮志 , juan 18, 1613 printed edition, 41a-41b.

33 Robert E. Harrist has raised this question. See “Connoisseurship: Seeing and Believing, ” in Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting, 303.

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inscriptions. A well-known official named Lu Shusheng 陸 樹 聲 (1509-1605) is an example. It was said that he disliked Zhang Juzheng who was so obsessive about his dress that he changed clothes four times during a meal hosted by Lu.

Ironically, Lu Shusheng made an exquisite portrait series representing himself in ten different costumes (fig. 5-5). This extant series, painted by a professional Jiaxing portraitist in 1591, carries a colophon written in 1789 by a descendant of Lu. According to the colophon, this series was originally mounted in the form of a handscroll. Due to the silk being severely worn, Lu’s eighteenth-century descendants repaired the work by cutting off the portrait images and remounting them into an album. Even though this is not my central topic, it is worth noting here the effect that physical changes like this had on the reception of a painting. In this case, the audience of the original handscroll would have seen ten consecutive images moving from left to right. By comparison, the album format, creates a rather abrupt viewing experience: the

34 For the distinction of clothing and its relation with social distinction in late Imperial China, see Kishimoto Mio, “Minshin jidai no mibun kankaku” 明清時 代の身分感覚, in Mori Maseo et al., Minshin jidaishi no kihon mondai 明清時代史 の基本問題 (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1997), 403-28.

Fig. 5-4 Xiang Shengmo and Zhang Qi, Venerable Friends, 1652, ink and colour on paper, hanging scroll, 38.1 x 22.5 cm, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai. Source: Chu- tsing Li and James C.Y. Watt, eds, The Chinese Scholar’s Studio, 144.

viewer does not know what the image on the next leaf will be.

There is no evidence that Lu Shusheng ever personally inscribed his portrait series. But his individual collection preserves four inscriptions for four portraits of him in, respectively, “coronet costume” (guanfu 冠服 ), “office costume” (gongfu 公服 ), “formal levee costume” (chaofu 朝 服 ), and “out-of-office costume” (yefu 野 服 ).

Given the subjects and contents, it is possible that these four inscriptions were created to match four images in the extant portrait series. Aside from the matched contents, another hint is that both the visuality and the texts adopt a retrospective angle.

The portrait series was painted when Lu was aged eighty-four and long retired, but the image shows the sitter in the prime of his life. The inscriptions are also a retrospective narrative of the author’s previous political activities. Unfortunately, it is difficult to reconstruct the way that these inscriptions entered Lu’s individual collection. Nonetheless, they certainly glorify the subject’s life playing various social roles and assuming successive official responsibilities. This honoured life experience inspired later inscribers. When the Qing scholar Weng Fanggang 翁 方 綱 (1733-1818) was asked by the eighth generation of Lu Shusheng’s clan for a colophon for the portrait series, Weng’s strategy, and perhaps also a natural reaction, was to recount Lu’s life in detail.

His inscription skilfully threads the by then remounted portraits – static and isolated – once again into a dynamic personal history of the subject.

Official costume played an indispensable role in another type of portrait, known as dailou tu 待漏圖 , namely “the picture of awaiting for the hour.” This kind of portrait depicted high officers in their official robes with tablets in hand, waiting for the prestigious levee to meet the emperor. No such painting survives, but there are a few extant inscriptions. Wang Zhi, a powerful

35 Zhu Guozhen 朱國禎 (fl. 1609-1632), Yongzhuang xiaopin 湧幢小品 , juan 10, 1622 printed edition, 11a-11b.

36 For a further discussion of the “abruptness” brought about by turning an album’s pages, see Anne Burkus-Chasson’s essay “Visual Hermeneutics and the Act of Turning the Leaf” (2015).

37 Du Lianzhe, Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 258.

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early Ming official, left a eulogy in his individual collection for a dailou portrait of the father of Emperor Xuanzong’s consort.

The eulogy was done under the invitation of the subject’s son (i.e.

the consort’s brother), probably after the father’s death in 1453.

Wang Zhi’s eulogy notably accentuates the portrait sitter’s noble dressing code and his prestigious status. “What grand clothing he wears,” Wang writes, “What imposing manner he has.” But Wang did not forget to add a dose of reality to his inscription in terms of making clear that the individual who had requested the inscription was fulfilling a social obligation. “The portrait is finished, but does not have a eulogy,” he notes, “[The son] thus asks me to compose one. How can my words sufficiently narrate his virtue (mei 美 ). But his invitation does not allow refuse. Hence I present my eulogy.”

When he wrote this eulogy, Wang Zhi was the Minister of Personnel and had considerable influence over the high court.

It seems that Wang’s inscription was desirable, even for a powerful relative of the emperor. The owning and displaying of a portrait carrying his inscription was desired and prestigious. Behind this apparently routine praise, then, was an implied socio-political relationship between the writer and the recipient.

An inscription could also personalise the solemn dailou portrait by infusing personal experience and emotion. An official and scholar named Zhi Dalun 支大倫 (1534-1604) euphemistically complains in an inscription on his own dailou portrait: “I read the books that people nowadays do not read, and suffer the toil that people in the past did not suffer.”

His complaint probably stemmed from the fact that levees were arduous experiences. The event began early, at sunrise. Participants were expected to arrive

38 Weng Fanggang, Fuchu zhai wenji 復初齋文集 , juan 34, 1878 printed edition, 4a-6a.

39 For a biography of the subject Sun Zhong 孫忠 , see Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi, juan 300, 8a-10b.

40 Wang Zhi, “Huichang hou Sun gong xiangzan” 會 昌 侯 孫 公 像 讚 , Yi’an wenhou ji 抑菴文後集 , juan 37, SKQS edition, 12a-13a.

41 For a biography of Wang Zhi, see Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi, juan 169, 5a-9b.

at the point when the intensity of illumination was just enough to be able to “tell the colour.”

The participants had to commute across the capital city regardless of the weather, and despite the extreme cold in Beijing during winter. Any misbehaviour during the levee, such as whispering, spitting or coughing, would result in correction and even discipline.

Zhi Dalun’s personal and emotional inscription on the dailou portrait is rather subversive as it casts irony over the glorious aura that the image tries to create.

This subversion shows the complexity of the role that inscriptions played in mediating portrait images and the reader’s experience.

The word tu in Chinese painting taxonomy suggests narrative elements. Huanji tu 宦 蹟 圖 , lit., “official trajectory pictures” is a portrait genre that incorporates narrative to commemorate the most crucial moments in an official’s life.

The commissioner could be the sitter himself, his descendants, subordinates, or local gentries from the place where the sitter held governmental service. The Palace Museum in Beijing possesses a very rare case in this regard. The commissioner was Xu Xianqing 徐顯卿 (1537-1602), an official hailing from Suzhou.

Xu Xianqing triumphed in the metropolitan examination in 1568, and then spent many years working at the Hanlin Academy. His career showed promise and the Hanlin Academy was a key personnel reserve of future Cabinet Ministers. In 1587, Xu received two successive promotions, after which he became the Vice Minister of Personnel. However, he was later harshly impeached and forced to resign from office. Perhaps this dishonourable retirement is the reason why Xu Xianqing’s biography is absent from all the

42 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 4.

43 Xu Xueju 徐学聚 (fl. 1583), Guochao dianhui 國朝典彚 , juan 109, 1624 edition, 13b-14a.

44 The regulations regarding which department was responsible for correcting misbehaving officials and when to correct changed slightly throughout the Ming dynasty. See Shen Shixing 申時行 (1535-1614) et al., Daming huidian 大明會典 , juan 44, 1587 edition, 7b-9a.

45 Huanji tu was a term in flux during the Ming time, in addition to which there are several others terms, such as lüli tu 屢歷圖 and xingli tu 行歷圖 , to denote the same type of paintings. See Ma Ya-chen, “Zhanxun yu huanji: Mingdai zhanzheng xiangguan tuxiang yu guanyuan shijue wenhua” 戰勳與宦蹟：明代 戰爭相關圖像與官員視覺文化, Mingdai yanjiu 明代研究 , Vol. 17 (2011): 60-63.

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major historical records of the Ming era.

Ironically, the portrait series and the accompanying inscriptions then become the most systematic biographical records of this once prominent official.

Xu Xianqing’s official-trajectory portraits were made in 1588 at the climax of Xu’s career. The whole series is mounted in an album of 26 pages. Each recto folio of the album has an image painted with refined brush strokes. Each image represents a challenging moment in the sitter’s life, in this case the death of Xu’s parents in his early years, his brushes with death as a result of severe illness and shipwreck, successive success in the civil examinations, promotions in officialdom, and honours granted by the emperor. Each verso folio has a long inscription, comprising a caption followed by a note of the sitter’s age and when the particular challenge occurred, a prose narrating the depicted event, and, at the end, a long poem (fig. 5-6). All 26 inscriptions follow this format. Their contents praise Xu’s courage, capacity, and fortune, all of which are the traits that Xu believed led him through danger, adversity and challenge. The last folio and

46 The following reconstruction of Xu Xianqing’s life is based on this portrait series and two studies. Yang Lili, “Yiwei Ming dai Hanlin guanyuann de gongzuo lüli – ‘Xu Xianqing huanjitu’ tuxiang jianxi” 一位明代翰林官員的工作 履歷——《徐顯卿宦蹟圖》圖像簡析 , Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 故宮博物院院 刊, No. 4 (2005): 42-66+157; Zhu Hong, “ ‘Xu Xianqing huanjitu’ yanjiu” 《徐顯 卿宦蹟圖》研究, Gugong bowuyuan yuankan, No. 2 (2011): 47-80+159.

Fig. 5-6 Anonymous, Xu Xianqing huanji tu, 1588, album, ink and colour on

paper, The Palace Museum, Beijing.

inscription stops at the year 1587, when the emperor conferred his parents titles..

An intriguing point is that Xu’s individual collection preserves the poetic part of all the 26 inscriptions. Furthermore, it includes another four poems, whose narratives continue from the year of 1587, telling of Xu’s successive promotions and his resignation in 1588. It remains unknown whether another four portrait pages representing these four poems ever existed. Or, whether the portrait series we see today is complete, given that Xu Xianqing continued his poetic project for another one and half years.

It is at least logical to speculate that after his retirement Xu might have shown this exquisite portrait series to guests and friends back in Suzhou. Like many of the above examples, his inscribed poems entered his individual collection.

Xu compiled this collection in person and prefaced it in 1599. The inclusion of these 20 poems implied an intention by the author to advertise his personal exploits through books. This intention created a system independent from the portrait series that enabled the multiplication and dissemination of the inscriptions.

Both systems, in Xu Xianqing’s case, succeeded in terms of their survival through transmission over the centuries, and, in turn, their ability to address generations of readers.

Interactions with the Deceased and the Living

Ming inscriptions were created for portraiture that had a ritual use, though in such cases it was less likely that the inscription is written on the painting’s surface. An important branch of ritual portraiture was for funeral and sacrifice use, painted after the sitter’s death. An episode in The Plum in the

portraiture in the everyday life of an affluent urban family.

In this episode, the hero Ximen Qing commissions a former court

47 Zhu Hong, “Huanjitu yanjiu,” 48.

48 Yang Lili tends to believe the existence of another four pages, see “Gongzuo lüli,” 44. Zhu Hong holds the opposite view, see “Huanjitu yanjiu,” 53.

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painter for a posthumous portrait of his dead concubine. He asked for two types of portraits: a full-length hanging scroll to be consecrated behind the memorial tablet, and a half-length one for the funeral. The painter was promised a reward of a bolt of satin and ten taels of silver, an impressive and generous payment given that in the same novel 4 taels are enough to prepare a decent banquet, and 3 taels was the monthly salary of Ximen’s secretary.

Craig Clunas reminds us that the novel’s author is euphemistically sarcastic about Ximen Qing’s arrangement, exposing a dead lady’s visage to a crowd of non-related men.

Yet another, but less discernible reason that Ximen warrants such sarcasm is his ignorance of the power of words to convey his emotion. He does not show the slightest awareness that he could write a eulogy, or a text in any other proper style, for his deceased beloved and her lifelike portraits. This ignorance marks the vulgarity of this novel’s hero, who strove to join the official class, but whose habits and manners are, in the eyes of the author, intrinsically different.

Ximen Qing emphasises the likeness in portraiture. It is arguable whether Chinese people valued the likeness for posthumous portraiture, especially those painted for remote ancestors for ritual use.

Meanwhile, the lifelikeness was significantly conditioned by the fact that some portraits were based solely on the commissioner’s verbal description of the deceased. It seems that the commissioner’s relation to the sitter was crucial in terms of whether the commission prioritised the likeness issue. An eighteenth century anecdote, for example, tells of a man who was orphaned in childhood and who, after years of practice, elevated his painting skills to a high level. This filial

49 Despite the fact that the setting of this novel is the last decades of the Northern Song dynasty, most scholars agree that it is a literary representation of late Ming society. See Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen eds., The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature Volume 2: From 1375, 107-108.

50 The dominance of silver as a currency, the very economic feature of late Ming, confirms that The Plum of Golden Vase was about the Ming society. Lanling xiaoxiao sheng 蘭陵笑笑生 , Jinping mei cihua 金瓶梅詞話 , the second collation by Mei Jie (Hong Kong: Mengmei guan, 1993), 817-25.

51 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, 91-93.

son then prays to Avalokitesvara, hoping that this merciful deity would send someone who looked like his parents, so that he could paint their faces.

Posthumous portraits did not enter Ming people’s art collections. In other words, these portraits were never undertaken from the perspective of connoisseurship. However, the inscriptions that accompanied them were treasured, either for their literariness or their social message. Zhang Bangqi 張 邦 奇 (1484-1544) is an example in this regard. This successful mid- Ming official devoted a fascicle of his collection exclusively to 51 portrait eulogies.

They were written for portraits of people ranging from official colleagues, minor clerks, friends, non-official scholars, to family members and ancestors, non-related women, a eunuch, Buddhist monks and the author himself. Some of the pages are dedicated to posthumous portraits. Zhang’s eulogies attest to a general attitude that educated men in late imperia China were attentive to inscriptions for posthumous portraits.

These writings were apparently important enough for them to be painstakingly collected from people outside the family circle.

An ancestor portrait, which the owner had already laboriously accumulated some inscriptions for, could be valuable. The above- mentioned filial son carried such a portrait of his parents when he fled from political persecution.

I will return to the actual creation process of these writings. Here, I will briefly outline a picture: in order to collect inscriptions for a posthumous portrait, one could either invite a visiting guest to view the portrait displayed in the mourning hall, and then ask for an inscription, or one could also send the picture to the desired writer.

Ming people also had their formal portraits painted from the likeness. Xirong 喜 容 , or “happy visage,” is the term that specifically denotes these kind of portraits. Xirong portraits often

52 For discussions of Chinese attitudes to likeness, see Eli Lancman, Chinese Portraiture, 38-40.

53 Yu Jiao 俞蛟 (b. 1751), Mengchang zazhu 夢厂雜著 , juan 6, 1828 Jingyi tang 敬 藝堂 edition, 2a-4b.

54 See Zhang Bangqi, Huanbi tang ji 環碧堂集 , juan 15, Ming edition.

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had rich political and social meanings. The xirong portraits of the notorious late Ming eunuch Wei Zhongxian 魏 忠 賢 (1568- 1627) sent to his shrines, for instance, were greeted by local officials who knelt in front of them in a ritual to show their reverence.

However, due to the fact that inscriptions are often written separately or detached from the pictures, the political and social meanings have become difficult for us to ascertain today. Nonetheless, the existing inscriptions allow us to explore the creation and reception of the lost portraits, and the insights gained in this process can be applied to the reconstruction of the social usage of xirong portraiture in general.

My exploration of this topic is once again based on Zhang Bangqi’s portrait eulogies. They clearly evidence that portraits of the living – both men and women – could reach people who had a connection with the subject or the subject’s family. The result of this interaction process was frequently an inscription.

Zhang Bangqi had 13 eulogies presented on female portraits, and almost the same number for male officials and non-officials.

The author did not differentiate between those people deceased and those alive. This is a good indication that a classification of portraits and the writings associated with them were not, at least by the sixteenth century, a matter of concern. It is noticeable that Zhang Bangqi composed eulogies for several non-related women.

Even if these female portraits were posthumous creations, his accessibility to them still casts doubts on a widely accepted idea that the image of a Ming woman could only be circulated within her family.

In other words, the publication of women’s images may be greater than we have hitherto assumed. They may have been sent to an unrelated man; indeed, there was considerable social tolerance of men’s writings dedicated to non-related female images.

55 Yu Jiao, Mengchang zazhu, juan 6, 2a-4b.

56 Wen Bing 文秉 (1609-1669), Xianbo zhishi 先撥志始 , juan xia 下 , Zhi hai 指 海 edition, comp. Qian Xizuo 錢熙祚 , printed between 1875-1908, 35a, 36a; Wu Yingji 吳應箕 (fl. 17th cent.), Qizhen liangchao bofu lu 啓禎兩朝剝復錄 , juan 3, Wushi loushan tang 吳氏樓山堂 edition, 13b.

Zhang Bangqi did have eulogies for his living male friends, which indicates the circulation of xirong portraits and inscriptions.

This is not the whole story of xirong portraits, however. After a sitter’s death, they were usually kept within the family for veneration. For family descendants, these portraits symbolised the deceased ancestors who were “patron saints” protecting them from disaster and decline. Undoubtedly, inscribed portraits of a lineage that could be traced back generations were a treasured legacy. The importance of this kind of family legacy to this study is that it often reveals the vicissitude of the clan. The portraits of successive generations of the Wang clan from Taicang 太 倉 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are an exemplary series. The pinnacle of the Wang clan was in the generations of Wang Xijue 王锡爵 (1534-1661), who once held the powerful post of Grand Secretary, his grandson Wang Shimin and Shimin’s grandson Wang Yuanqi. In contrast to the clan’s prestige, the

The portraits are all in the hanging scroll format, which, as shown in chapter 2, gives little space for long inscriptions. None of the sitters personally inscribed the paintings. Rather, they invited respected friends to undertake the inscribing work. However, when the Wang clan began to wane in the mid-eighteenth century, this conservative manner changed. A descendant in the 1770s had a portrait of his own made that was very different from the clan’s traditional portraits. This portrait adopted the handscroll format, which could accommodate much more inscriptions. The sitter personally inscribed and re-inscribed many poems on the colophon sheet. He subsequently invited friends to make further contributions of inscriptions. These inscriptions laud the subject’s merits and characteristics. As scholars have suggested, if we view this inscribed scroll in the context of clan vicissitudes, it appears that it is an effort to fight against the decline of the clan and to herald a revival, and a spiritual communication with prominent ancestors.

Thus, I argue, portrait inscriptions speak to an

57 For a discussion of this idea, see Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, 91-93.

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audience not only with their contents, but equally importantly, albeit less visibly, with their forms and materials. Moreover, a broader historical context may illuminate the meaning hidden in the physical combination of a portrait and an inscription, meaning that may go unnoticed when researchers only focus on one particular work.

It is interesting that sometimes inscriptions competed with portrait images for credibility. Yang Shiqi, for example, wrote a long poem on a portrait of an old friend and colleague who was about to retire. The portrait presented to Yang was apparently not very good. Hence, in a preface to the poem, he reminds future readers that they “do not have to look at the image,” because

“appreciating my poem is enough.”

As for Yang Shiqi, he was confident that his text would be a solid foundation for anybody who wanted to learn the intrinsic traits of his friend.

Xirong was often produced for birthday celebrations of

senior people. Jan Stuarts infers that “their use in a closed family context rendered identifying inscriptions unnecessary, but encomiums with the subject’s name, rank, birth and death dates, and a career synopsis were desired.”

This is true for a xirong portrait of a Ming scholar now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The portrait bears a concise and short inscription, stating that its genesis was for the sitter’s eighty-fifth sui birthday.

Meanwhile, there are examples of xirong portraits bearing long and complicated inscriptions rather than merely “encomiums.”

The most well-known is a portrait of Shen Zhou. This lifelike bust-length portrait is not from the hands of Shen Zhou, but

58 Wan Xinhua, “Xiaoxiang, jiazu, rentong – Cong Yu Zhiding ‘Baimiao Wang Yuanqi xiang’ zhou tanqi” 肖像．家族．認同從 —— 禹之鼎《白描王原祁像》

軸談起, in Xiangying shenquan – Ming Qing renwu xiaoxianghua xueshu yantaohui lunwenji 像 應 神 全 —— 明 清 人 物 肖 像 畫 學 術 研 討 會 論 文 集 , ed. Lü Lili and Kuongu Hun (Macao: Macao Museum of Art, 2011), 229-234.

59 Yang Shiqi, Dongli xuji 東 里 續 集 juan 56, SKQS supplemented by SKQS Wenji ge 文津閣 edition, 6a-6b.

60 Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits (Washington DC: Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M.

Sackler Gallery, in association with Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 63.

from an anonymous professional painter (fig. 5-7). In the portrait, Shen Zhou wears a black scholar cap and a simple yet decent robe suitable for an educated man without any scholarly degree.

The portrait was made for Shen Zhou’s eighty-sui birthday. The occasion reminds us of a similar one years before the execution of this portrait, the birthday of Shen Zhou’s uncle, Shen Zhen, which I briefly discussed in chapter 2. Yang Jingzhang was the portraitist in that case, and his services were recompensed with a painting by Shen Zhou’s cousin Shen Yun. This reward was given extra value by two inscriptions presented by Shen Zhen and Shen Zhou’s son Shen Pu 沈璞 .

The birthday portrait of Shen Zhou bears a poem written by the sitter. That the poem is dated 1506 indicates that it was probably written soon after the painting’s completion. The inscription, located exactly above the figure’s head, is in the typically graceful and clean calligraphy of Shen Zhou:

People find fault on his eyes tight-spaced, and also his forehead too narrow,

I can neither judge its likeness, nor the distortions.

Why bother about the facial appearance; [I am] only afraid of moral defect.

Drifting along for eighty years, now I live beside death.

I, The old man Shitian, self-inscribed in the first year of the Zhengde Reign [1506]

人謂眼差小 , 又説頤太窄 .

我自不能知 , 亦不知其失 .

面目何足較 , 但恐有失徳 .

苟且八十年 , 今與死隔壁 . 正德改元石田老人自題。

Here, I disagree with some translations that use the first

61 It is debatable whether the portrait was made, as Maxwell Hearn’s label attributes, for “the Artist’s Great-Granduncle” More likely, the subject’s great- grand cousin hired a professional portraitist for the picture and inscribed a short dedication. See Maxwell Hearn, How to Read a Chinese Painting (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 130-31.

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person in the first couplet.

The pronoun qi 其 , or “its,” in the second couplet clearly indicates that Shen Zhou conceived his image as something alien. I will return to the point about how inscribers referred to themselves in inscriptions on their portraits.

In ancient Chinese society, age was a visual phenomenon. The physical deterioration brought about by age made age socially visible.

Xirong portraits for senior people hence should be

62 Chen Zhenghong, Shen Zhou nianpu, 108-109.

63 See Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, 28; Yao Ning, “Commemorating the Deceased”, 11-12.

Fig. 5-7 Anonymous, Portrait of Shen Zhou, 1506, ink and colour on silk,

hanging scroll,71 x 52.5 cm, The Palace Museum, Beijing.

viewed in this social context. They not only added to the joyful atmosphere of a celebration, but also visually projected the subject’s age – mostly old age – to all, including the subject himself.

Shen Zhou’s remark that he lived beside death was neither rhetorical, nor an exaggeration. A statistic shows that in the late Qing period, when medical conditions were similar to those in the mid-Ming era, the life expectancy of males in the age group 75+

was only 3.7 years and that the probability per thousand of dying within the next five years was 538.

Shen Zhou no doubt sensed his ageing and the vulnerability to death liability, and adopted a candid gesture. Jerome Silbergeld has argued that the Chinese had two categories of attitudes towards old age: Confucian opinion respects the elderly; Daoism pursues longevity.

Both attitudes are discernible in the above poem by Shen Zhou. This poem, in an archaic style (guti 古 體 ), above all explores the issue of the similarity between the self in reality and the self in painting, probably the most frequently pursued question in the field of human portraiture. But Shen Zhou’s poem does not problematize the tension between facial appearance (mao 貌 ) and spirit (shen 神 ). Instead, it dichotomizes “facial appearance”

and “moral integrity.” In Confucian thought, moral integrity is a life-long process of self-perfection.

Shen Zhou kept a distance from the civil service system throughout his life, but he never lost his identity as a stalwart upholder of Confucian principles and he obviously values internal merits over external elements.

But, in the end, he is not relieved and liberated by age: he already

64 Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness, 188.

65 The statistical data is drawn from James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell’s research on the distribution of life expectancies and mortality in different groups of age, sex, etc., in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries Liaoning. See James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning 1774-1873 (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 58-82

.

66 See Jerome Silbergeld, “Chinese Concepts of Old Age and Their Role in Chinese Painting, Painting Theory and Criticism,” Art Journal, Vol. 46, No. 6 (Summer 1987): 103-14.

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anticipates death.

It is widely acknowledged that portraiture in China had a unique thread of development at the hands of professional artisans. They were, to some extent, independent from the other painting genres that were discursively in control of the cultural elite.

But the elite were not completely absent in this domain.

In the fourteenth century, xiaoxiang 小 像 , or “small portrait,”

thrived in the circle of educated men. An example of this type of informal portrait is A Small Portrait of Yang Zhuxi (Yang Zhuxi

portrait as one that is less about life likeness than a projection of the subject’s noble character.

But the delicate facial details and relatively correct body proportions do point to a certain concern for resemblance with the sitter. The portrait carries an inscription written by Ni Zan, at the left end of the picture surface, in which Ni states that Wang Yi has painted the human figure, and that he, Ni, was responsible for the landscape part. This collaborative scheme is thus clearly stated to any beholder.

The collaborative scheme reoccurred in many later productions of informal small portraits. These portraits had no ritual function. They anticipated intimate viewing and circulation among the owner’s small coterie, in the course of which they often accumulated inscriptions. To some extent, small portrait is the genre that most anticipated contemporaneous and future inscriptions. The great portraitist Zeng Jing left a number of portraits like this. Zeng originally hailed from Fujian Province and spent most of his life in the Jiangnan area. There, he established a connections with elite scholars, artists and influential collectors, including Wang Shimin, Xiang Yuanbian, Li Rihua and his son Li Zhaoheng. Through mutual friends, he may also have met Father Mateo Ricci (1552-1610), Li Madou 利瑪竇 in Chinese, and gained

67 For self-perfection in the intellectuals of late imperial China, see Robert H. Hegel, “An Exploration of the Chinese Literary Self,” in Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, ed. Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1985), 7.

68 Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, 29.

accessed to Western art. That said, the extent to which this contact impacted his art should not be overestimated.

Zeng Jing’s A Portrait of Mister Pan Qintai (Pan Qintai

Art, was produced in 1621 for a respected Suzhou scholar named Pan Qintai. In this portrait, similar to Lu Shusheng’s “non- official robe” portrait, Pan is dressed in a simple scholar robe with a bamboo staff in his right hand, a common visual symbol of a reclusive spirit and virtue. What differs significantly from Lu Shusheng’s portrait is the painter’s autographic dedication and seven inscriptions, which surround the painted figure in the centre of the painting surface. The seven inscriptions - four eulogies, two proses and a poem - are all from the hands of Pan’s associates, including the famous mountain man Chen Jiru and the scholar painter Li Liufang.

It raises the question of whether Zeng Jing had anticipated these inscriptions and whether he had reserved room for them in advance. But it is safe to conclude that the inscribers executed their inscriptions in cooperation. The seven inscriptions are distributed evenly in a balanced composition. The contents of these inscriptions are quite consistent. They praise Pan’s elegant interests in tea, bamboo and the zither as well as his righteous character and his harmonious family. The image and inscriptions thus made an excellent pictorial and literary homage to the subject.

Inscriptions on a work such as this might have gone beyond the subject’s small coterie into textual dissemination by means of public display, gift- giving, or transaction. It is also possible that they were copied. A copy of Zeng Jing’s original, now in the Shanghai Museum, is an example that not only painstakingly replicated the original image

69 For a short discussion of Wang Yi’s portrait theory and practice, see Sherman E. Lee, “Varieties of Portraiture in Chinese and Japanese Art,” 123.

70 Marshall P.S. Wu, The Orchid Pavilion Gathering: Chinese Painting from the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Vol. I Main Catalogue (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2000), 121.

71 For the inscriptions and English translations, see Peter C. Sturman and Susan Tai eds., The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Munich : Delmonico Books/

Prestel, 2012), 280.