Celebration by the River: Formerly Attributed to Zhao Mengfu by Richard M. Barnhart

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Anastasia Stephens
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1 Celebration by the River: Formerly Attributed to Zhao Mengfu by Richard M. Barnhart In 1947 the Claremont Colleges acquired a group of old Chinese paintings that had been owned by General Johan Wilhelm Normann Munthe ( ) and other early collectors of Chinese art long resident in China such as Dr. William B. Pettus (b. 1880?). 1 Most of these paintings seem to have been acquired in China between 1909 and Among them is a hanging scroll on silk done in the classical Li Cheng-Guo Xi style of the Song dynasty ( ) with an inscribed poem in the upper right corner bearing the signature and seal of the distinguished scholar and artist Zhao Mengfu ( ) (fig. 1). On the end of one porcelain roller is a carefully written Chinese notation that identifies the painter as 趙文敏 Zhao Wenmin, and gives the title of this painting as 如江賀 Rujianghe, which seems to mean something like Celebration by the River (fig. 2). To the right of the artist s name in this catalog-like inscription are three characters reading 山水餘 shanshui yu, which could be read as meaning left-over landscape, in the way later writers sometimes criticized the left-over one-corner landscape paintings of the Southern Song court, but more likely simply means surplus landscape painting. It appears to be a collector-dealer s catalogue notation providing the name of the painter, the title of the work, and its general category as a landscape painting and, in this case, perhaps indicating that it was surplus to be sold. I don t know exactly how to understand the title given on the roller end either, but it clearly refers to the central theme or story of the painting, and could be derived directly from the subject matter the owner read into the work, if not from an earlier title. Depicted in fine detail in the center foreground, a small family celebration is taking place on the nearby riverbank as a fisherman steps from his small boat with fish in hand while being greeted by his wife who reaches out to take the fish he 1

2 extends - and by a child, who runs happily toward him from the right (fig. 3). Partly visible along the right edge is their home; and another thatched residence lies further into the picture s space. The nature of this foreground activity seems clear enough, and there is further reason to read the three figures and physical activities in the painting precisely this way because that is how they are read in the poem written at the top of the painting (fig. 4), which is transcribed and translated as follows: 晚來收釣艇, 且喜得魚歸妻子欣相慶, 溪源魚政肥 At evening he brings in the boat, Happy to return with fish. Wife and child share his happiness, For the fish upstream are nice and fat! This simple poem seems somehow inseparable from the painting itself, which otherwise now shows no clear sign of an author in the form of a signature or seal. It can, I think, be understood to reflect the ideas of both the writer and the painter, and identifies the fisherman as the father, the approaching adult as his wife, and the running child as the son of this couple. Written in an easy, relaxed hand, the poem is signed Zi ang ti, inscribed by Zi ang. Zi ang being the zi or alternate name of Zhao Mengfu, the most influential artist in China around Usually, when Zhao added the character ti, or inscribed, to his inscriptions, it signified that he was writing on the work of someone else, although there is at least one notable example of such a usage on his own works. Two self-inscriptions on or attached to Zhao s Mounted Official of 1296 use the verb ti, indicating that there were exceptions in the more common use of ti only when inscribing the work of others. 2 2

3 Directly beneath the last character of the inscription the faint traces of a seal remain. With assistance it can just barely be read as Zhao Zi ang shi, a version of the familiar square seal used by Zhao frequently in such circumstances. He used one or another seal with this legend so often that he owned many versions of it, differing only slightly in size and detail. 3 While the painting in its present physical condition is otherwise unsigned, it selfidentifies clearly enough in style, brushwork, composition, and physical character to take its place as part of a small set of similar landscape paintings dated from 1323 to 1334 and signed by Tang Di ( ), a disciple of Zhao Mengfu and well-known practitioner of the Li-Guo style during the Yuan period. James Cahill s brief description of Tang Di s style captures it perfectly: His extant paintings are mostly hanging scrolls painted on silk and typically set a group of tall foreground trees against a broad expanse of river and shore, marked by tree clusters of diminishing size and ending in low hills The trees in his paintings, with their crab-claw branches and spidery pattern of twigs, along with the scalloped contours of earth masses, give a rococolike decorative quality to his style. The sense of animation in Tang Di s pictures is typically accentuated by figures engaged in some seminarrative activity. 4 In the company of Tang Di s signed and dated compositions of 1323 (Metropolitan Museum, fig. 5) and 1334 (Shanghai Museum, fig. 6), and his signed but undated River Landscape in the National Palace Museum (fig. 7), Celebration by the River fits like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. And since Zhao Mengfu died in 1322, his inscription, if genuine, would date the painting at least one year earlier than any other known work by Tang Di. Surprisingly, despite the well-documented relationship between Zhao Mengfu and Tang Di, there are no other extant paintings combining the work of the two men (as far as we know at present), and the Scripps painting gains a further interesting association if the authenticity of these features can be confirmed. 3

4 We may note, then, that the only possible inauthentic element on Celebration by the River in its present condition would be the inscription with purported signature and seal of Zhao Mengfu, since the painting itself, even in Zhao s colophon, does not identify a maker. This inscription is written freely and loosely, in a manner sometimes approaching caoshu or cursive writing. Some contemporary authorities have reportedly judged it to be a forgery, 5 but I think the real problem lies in the differences that have emerged among modern connoisseurs more widely in recent years concerning Zhao Mengfu s late calligraphy. This period of Zhao s life has proven to be particularly difficult to understand, and controversy has been especially acute in the case of his fairly rare calligraphy written on silk, as in the Scripps College painting. For example, a bold and freely written poem on silk written on a large scale as a hanging scroll, formerly in the collection of John M. Crawford, Jr., and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was judged by Wen Fong to be a rare large-scale work from the artist s late period, written after his final retirement to Wuxing in 1319 (fig. 8). 6 Now, however, following trends in contemporary connoisseurship, the museum considers the work to be a forgery made sometime during the Ming dynasty. 7 Similarly, the only other large-scale work of this kind, a hanging scroll on silk in the Xinxiang County Museum, was judged to be a Ming forgery by two members of the distinguished authentication group in China, while Liu Jiu an, the third member present, considered it genuine (fig. 9). 8 The inscription on Celebration by the River is similar in style to both of these writings, and it is therefore not surprising that it could arouse similar controversy. Though I have not seen the Xinxiang County example, all three may well be genuine. The identity of Tang Di as author of Celebration by the River is revealed in its details of drawing and composition, from the broad river landscape to the characteristics of brushwork in the depiction of rocks and trees, and in the vividly professional depiction of figures, as we have already noted. Tang Di had a long official career as an official and painter. He painted walls for the imperial court and large hanging scrolls for the offices of high officials, while serving in a variety of bureaucratic posts in which he quietly gained a reputation among his colleagues for his decency, 4

5 efficiency, and honesty. Zhao Mengfu s well-documented relationship with his fellow-townsman Tang Di is attested to by several writers of the period, and is not in doubt. Recently however Shih Shou-chien has questioned whether the extant works of Tang Di offer any real evidence of their artistic relationship, and suggests that they do not. Shih s study of Tang Di is the most complete we have, and firmly fixes his dates. 9 Shane McCausland, in his recent monographic study of Zhao Mengfu, describes the artist s declining health in his last few years, following both the death of his beloved wife in 1319 and his final return to his old home in Wuxing, where his own health declined rapidly until his death in This is the time when he would have written the inscription on Celebration by the River. McCausland implies that Zhao may have worked closely at this time with some of his family members and his circle of disciples or menren, which included Tang Di, in fulfilling the many obligations his reputation accrued, and which his declining health made more and more difficult for him to satisfy alone. Returning Fisherman, among other things, could suggest that one way the aging master may have indirectly acknowledged such assistance was by inscribing a little, informal poem on the work of his disciple. This would have had the effect of both recommending his protégé and adding value to his work. Another possible way of understanding all of the elements of Celebration by the River would be to see it as the purported work of Zhao Mengfu actually painted by one of his ghost painters or daibi, namely, the young Tang Di, in fulfillment of yet another request for a painting by the aging master. I mention this possibility while finding it implausible, if only because even today it is so easy to distinguish between the styles of Tang Di and Zhao Mengfu. If Tang were trying to emulate his master he could certainly have done it more convincingly. We must presume that there were certain courtesies and unspoken niceties involved when Zhao Mengfu inscribed the work of his contemporaries, especially younger painters, although we have no certain knowledge of what they may have 5

6 been. Judging from extant works, such activity was rather rare, making generalizations difficult, so I do not know if it is significant that Tang Di s earliest extant dated painting was not done until 1323, the year after Zhao Mengfu s death. It does seems curious that Zhao does not mention the name of any painter in his inscription on Celebration by the River; that would make sense to me only if the painter was unknown to Zhao Mengfu which does not seem possible or if there were already some mark of the painter on the scroll, which leads me to guess that there was originally at least a seal and perhaps a small signature of Tang Di along one of the edges of the painting. The placement of Zhao Mengfu s inscription so close to the present upper edge of the silk alone strongly suggests substantial trimming, as does the cutting off of details in the lower right corner. Some of Tang s large river landscapes, such as the undated River Landscape in the National Palace Museum (fig. 7) have relatively small signature-seal documentation close to an edge (here the lower right corner) that could easily have been trimmed off. Yet another explanation, of course, would be that a later owner of the painting may have realized that this painting by the relatively minor and unimportant Tang Di could easily be made into an infinitely more valuable Zhao Mengfu simply by removing the painter s signature, leaving the signed and sealed inscription by Zhao Mengfu to identify the painter. This is the explanation I find most likely. Celebration by the River was acquired in China at the height of the first great era of the international passion for early Chinese paintings between 1890 and 1930, a period when world-wide demand for classical old paintings such as those of Zhao Mengfu was at a fever pitch. Charles Lang Freer acquired over twenty paintings attributed to Zhao before his death in 1919; Dubois Schanck Morris brought eight paintings attributed to Zhao Mengfu back from China in 1928; and there are others bearing his name in the Scripps College collection. Tang Di s oeuvre is uneven, like the other Yuan followers of the Li-Guo tradition. Some of his large-scale landscapes have a perfunctory look, as if done almost mechanically, and at least once he used stencils for figure groups, repeating the 6

7 same group in slightly different settings. 11 His pine trees are done according to simple formulas, perhaps as they were taught to him by Zhao Mengfu along with the typical cloud-like rock shapes that Zhao taught his students. His fishermen groups have the look of a band of brothers, although the happy fisherman had long-since become a convention with little necessary connection to reality. What initially seems most striking about Tang Di s finer river landscapes such as the Scripps College painting is their breadth of vision, even though this too was a convention made common by the river landscapes of the Guo Xi tradition as it evolved through the Song period into the Yuan. Zhao Mengfu was of course an influential practitioner and teacher of this tradition, among others. Unsurprisingly, Tang Di has not been the subject of widespread modern acclaim, and in fact has generally been regarded lightly by contemporary writers including the present writer. 12 Why, then, take so much pleasure at finding yet another conventional painting by a minor artist of the 14 th century? There is, of course, a certain satisfaction in finding any unpublished work by a known painter who lived and worked in China some eight hundred years ago, but, then, quite some time after I arrived at my own understanding of Celebration by the River I came across James Cahill s precise characterization of the painting, included in his 1985 Index of Chinese paintings: Good Yuan work in the style of T ang Ti; possibly by him. 13 This put my so-called discovery into better perspective, but also reassured me that at least one other scholar saw the painting as I do, and found the discovery of another Yuan paintings by a second-rank artist as rewarding as I do. Perhaps I am over-reading, but I am drawn to the painter s focus on the vividlydepicted human activity at the center of the Scripps College painting, and the seeming understanding between the choices made by the painter and the reading of the image made by the writer of the poetic inscription or I would simply say, between the elderly Zhao Mengfu and the young Tang Di. Zhao, who was either there when the painting was done or saw it in the hands of his young protégé, read it simply as a representation of the nuclear family: father, mother, child; in other 7

8 words as an image of the laobaixing, the old hundred names, the common people living their workaday lives as ever. This little family is the center of their world, along the margins of China s rivers and lakes. Tang Di s river family, so happy to have found fresh fish for their dinner, presents an interesting contrast to the remote sense of human lives lived among the vast spaces suggested in the landscape tradition within which Tang Di grew up. One of the most beautiful examples of that tradition is a large, anonymous painting in the National Palace Museum known as Waiting for a Ferry by Wintry Groves, Hanlin daidu tu, a work of monumental scope described by James Cahill as a Fine Chin or early Yuan work in the Kuo Hsi tradition (fig. 10). 14 This broad river landscape also contains families, homes, and travelers, but they very nearly disappear within the endless spaces and nuanced atmospheric perspective used so effectively by the unknown painter. This painter was still working within the parameters of the Song and Jin traditions of Li Cheng and Guo Xi, and probably in northern China instead of Wuxing. Waiting for a Ferry may be among the last of such superb evocations of the great universe made in the tradition of Song monumental landscape painting. Ironically, given the vast scope of the Mongol empire, for southern Chinese scholars such as Zhao Mengfu and Tang Di the great physical universe no longer held the same meanings it once had. The small universe of nuclear family and ancestors became the center of everything Zhao Mengfu cherished and taught, in his life as in his art. A plausible illusion of space and atmosphere disappeared from Chinese painting at about the same time. Thus, in Tang Di s Celebration by the River, it is the small group constituting father, mother, and child sharing their excitement at having fresh-caught fish for dinner that occupies the center of our attention, emphasized for us by the simple poem Zhao Mengfu inscribed on the painting, which is only about a family and its dinner. These ideals still lingered in the mind of Wu Zhen when he painted his Fisherman on Lake Dongting in 1341 and ended his poem about fishing with the line, He fishes only for perch, not fame. 15 There is of course a great deal more at issue than fresh 8

9 fish and the lives of a small family in any painting done by a Chinese scholar-official living during the century-long rule of the Mongols over China. Zhao Mengfu himself first made us think of that fisherman, living in a country ruled by Mongol tribesmen, when he painted his Twin Pines, Level Distance, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 11). Zhao s remote, isolated fisherman lives somewhere else, at least in his mind. It is the inner spaces of the mind that now create the depths of Chinese painting. My thanks to professors Bai Qianshen of Zhejiang University and Bruce Coats of Scripps College. 1 A very attractive catalogue of thirty-four of these paintings, all recently cleaned and remounted, is published as Preserving China s Past: Paintings of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, 2015). 2 Reproduced in James Cahill et al, Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (Yale University Press, 1997), fig Nine of them are reproduced in Victoria Contag and Wang Chi-ch ien, Seals of Chinese Painters and Collectors of the Ming and Ch ing Periods (Revised edition, Hong Kong University Press, 1966), pp. 525 and Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (as in n. 2), pp According to faculty and staff at the gallery, informally. 6 Wen Fong, Beyond Representation (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1992), pp According to information provided on the museum s website, under Zhao Mengfu. 8 Zhongguo Gudai Shuhua Tumu (Beijing, ), vol. 8, p Shih Shou-chien, Tang Di ( ) and the Development of the Li-Guo Style in the Yuan Dynasty (in Chinese), Meishuyanjiu, no. 5 (March, 1991), pp Shane McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai s China (Hong Kong University Press, 2011), pp For these paintings, dated 1338 in the National Palace Museum, and 1342, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Wen Fong, Beyond Representation, pp Richard M. Barnhart, Along the Border of Heaven: Sung and Yuan Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), pp James Cahill, An Index of Chinese Painters and Paintings: T ang, Sung, and Yuan (University of California Press, 1980), p Ibid., Reproduced in Gugong Shuhua Tulu (Taipei, National Palace Museum, 1991?), pp

Mengfu (1254-1322). Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College.

10 List of illustrations Fig1. Celebration by the River (Rujianghe), formerly attributed to Zhao Mengfu ( ). Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College. Hanging scroll, ink and slight color on silk, x cm. Fig2. Detail of fig. 1. Inscription on roller end. 10

11 Fig3. Detail of fig. 1. Figures in foreground. Fig 4. Detail of fig. 1. Poem by Zhao Mengfu. 11

Fig 5. Tang Di (1297-1355), Painting after Wang Wei s Poem, dated 1323.

Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, 1985. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fig 6.

12 Fig 5. Tang Di ( ), Painting after Wang Wei s Poem, dated Hanging scroll, ink and light color on silk x 69.2 cm. Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fig 6. Tang Di, Drinking Party in the Shade of Pines, dated Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk x 97.1 cm. Shanghai Museum.. 12

Fig 7. Tang Di, River Landscape. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on silk. 133.4 x 86.5 cm.

Hanging scroll, ink on silk. 134.3 x 53 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford, Jr., 1988.

13 Fig 7. Tang Di, River Landscape. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on silk x 86.5 cm. The National Palace Museum, Taipei. Fig 8. Zhao Mengfu, A Summer Idyll, after Hanging scroll, ink on silk x 53 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford, Jr., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fig 9. Zhao Mengfu, Poem by Du Fu. Hanging scroll, ink on silk. 128 x 47 cm. Xinxiang Museum, Henan Province. 13

14 Fig 10. Anon., Waiting for the Ferry by a Wintry Grove. 13 th century? Hanging scroll, ink on silk x 99.7 cm. The National Palace Museum, Taipei. Fig 11. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance. Handscroll, ink on paper x cm. Gift of the Dillon Fund, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Section. 14

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