1616

by Christensen, Thomas

  This outrage did not sit well with the community, and someone composed a satirical ballad about the incident, which reached the ears of the artist. Dong thought he knew who had composed the song, and he had that man — who happened to be his own brother-in-law — seized and humiliated. Soon after, the songwriter died mysteriously.

  The brother-in-law’s wife and mother came with some maidservants to Dong’s estate to complain. Dong’s son had their clothes torn off, and they were bound and brutally beaten. One or more of the maidservants was probably raped. They were thrown into the street “their faces covered with mud; above, without clothing to cover their bodies,” it was written, “the blood running down to their feet; and below, lacking even cloth enough to conceal their shame.”

  That Dong was later officially exonerated might not mean a lot, since power favors power. Three hundred fifty years later many people in China were still angry at him. During the Cultural Revolution his tomb was vandalized. His works were not exhibited or published, and he was presented as an object lesson of the abuses of the landlord class.

  Contemporary art historians are more inclined to gloss over the issue, which received little attention in an international symposium devoted to the artist, held at the Nelson Atkins Museum in 1992. Which is perhaps as it should be: whatever his failings as a person, Dong, it cannot be denied, was the foremost art historian, collector of antiquities, and painter of his day. He was a driven man who had worked his way up from genteel poverty. At eighteen he was devastated by taking only second place in an exam on account of his unexceptional calligraphy. He then applied himself to the art with such dedication that he became famous as a master of it. In his twenties he took a job as a tutor in the household of the foremost art collector of that time, which trained his eye as an antiquarian. In his mid-thirties he was elected to China’s most prestigious scholarly academy and served off and on in the 1590s in the imperial court in Beijing. He was a tutor to one of the Wanli emperor’s sons, his unfortunate successor the Taichang emperor, who was a pawn in court intrigues and ruled for only a month before dying, likely of poisoning.

  The future Taichang emperor was not the Wanli emperor’s preference as his successor (his choice was a later son by his favorite consort), and the imperial family, the emperor’s wives and concubines, the court eunuchs, and the civil officials all engaged in political maneuvers and intrigues backing one candidate or another. Dong seems to have fallen victim to this poisonous environment, and in 1599 he was assigned to be transferred to another region; he refused the post and returned home. The remaining thirty-seven years of his life would be characterized by long periods of retreat to his personal estate punctuated by short terms of government service. Through this “advance and retreat” strategy he mostly steered clear of the often fatal political intrigues of the time (in the 1620s, for example, hundreds of scholar officials were executed in a systematic purge).

  Dong Qichang, by Zeng Jing, frontispiece to the album Eight Views of Autumn Moods, 1620, by Dong Qichang. Shanghai Museum.

  Somewhere along the way Dong became a practitioner of Chan Buddhism (the Chinese counterpart to Japanese Zen). Toward the end of the sixteenth century he fell under the sway of Li Zhi, the prominent advocate of “Mad Chan.” Inspired by the “Neo-Confucianism” of Wang Yangming, Li rebelled against convention. He advocated a kind of moral relativism and promoted an ideal of “sudden enlightenment.” Although Dong later distanced himself from Li’s philosophy, he developed a theory of painting that reflects Chan Buddhist influence. Traditionally, in Chan Buddhist practice, students study with established masters. Only the master can determine when the student has “graduated” and become qualified to become a master in turn. Because of this practice, Chan was extremely focused on the concept of lineage. Since the practice was not based on holy books, the lineages reflected its established traditions. Chan temples often contained a “Hall of Patriarchs” filled with portraits representing the lineage of the temple.

  Dong adopted this concept of lineage and applied it to the traditions of painting. He distinguished two main schools, or lineages, which he called the “northern school” and the “southern school,” a terminology that would take hold and become the orthodox approach to Chinese painting for centuries. It would drive generations of students of Chinese painting to distraction, because the terms “northern” and “southern” had nothing to do with geography. They were metaphors based on two traditions of Chan Buddhism. The northern school of Chan was based on long periods of chanting, study, and personal austerity. It viewed the achievement of enlightenment as a long, gradual process. The southern school of Chan, by contrast, emphasized internal examination of the self in order to achieve sudden enlightenment.

  Applying this distinction to painting, Dong promoted a “southern school” that was based on amateurism as superior to a “northern school” of professional painters. For Dong, professional painting was about the acquisition of technique in order to produce pretty surfaces. But amateurs — the Confucian literati — were supposed to cultivate the self. They were expected to be accomplished in all cultural refinements, such as poetry, calligraphy, and philosophy. By cultivating the self, the amateur painter could produce works that would be more meaningful and soulful than the hollow technical achievements of the professionals, which were mere surface displays of proficiency. While professional painters might capture the outward essence of a landscape, for example, the literati painters of the southern school, because of their personal refinement, would convey the essence hidden beneath the surface.

  Dong believed he embodied the virtues of the Southern School; indeed, he was the very culmination of its lineage. A cynic, however, might see his “amateurism” as a kind of professionalism in disguise, played for higher stakes. (Analogy could be made to the official Ming line that international trade was mostly not economic in nature but merely the exchange of gifts and tributes.) Northern school professionals might carry their paintings with them to market and sell them to wealthy merchants and traders like any common vendor. Southern school painters did not sell their paintings so blatantly (or so cheaply), but used them to promote themselves as scholars in order to rise in the civil bureaucracy. They also exchanged paintings as gifts, which resulted not in direct payments but in favors that were potentially more valuable.

  Landscape, 1617, by Dong Qichang. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 81 × 299 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, museum purchase (AS4-1978).

  Qingbian Mountain, 1617, by Dong Qichang. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 67 × 225 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Fund, 1980.10.

  Two works made in 1617 reflect Dong Qichang’s mid-career painting style. Forced to flee his home by rioting tenant farmers and villagers, Dong painted prolifically in the years that followed.

  The paintings reflect both Dong’s study of ancient predecessors and his fundamental belief that paintings should represent the spirit of a landscape rather than its exterior form. Of the Cleveland landscape he wrote:

  Zhao Mengfu and Wang Meng both painted depictions of the Bian Mountains. I have traveled to those mountains and moored my boat beneath them. There I realized that the paintings by the two masters transmitted the spirit of the place. But the soul of those mountains and streams is inexhaustible. I went beyond the work of the others to fashion another scene of my own that is not without merit.

  So it was that after the torching of his estate Dong stayed with friends or traveled in a boat on the river, feverishly painting. By exchanging these paintings with other members of the educated elite he was able after a few years to reestablish his personal fortune and position in society. “A number of Dong Qichang’s best works are dated to the years immediately after 1616,” scholar James Cahill has observed, “when the terrible losses of the riot and fire forced him to paint and write prolifically.” As Cahill has noted, two paintings made in 1617, now in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Cleveland Museum of A
rt, are representative of his work from this period (p. 137).

  The Melbourne landscape, painted around November, was an example of the works Dong made as gifts for a friends following the riot on this estate. It exemplifies his theories of “divide and unite” and “substance and void.” The painting, almost ten feet tall, consists of a foreground scene of trees and rocks and a background scene of lightly wooded mountains. An empty section devoid of ink that meanders through the center of the painting represents a river separating the foreground and background. Writhing trees in the foreground lean left as if straining toward the mountains, while the mountains themselves curl to the right in counterpoint to the foreground trees. A house on the far shore is sketched in with a few light strokes, surrounded by dark trees and landscape features rendered in tones of gray. Dong judiciously balances areas of ink and blank paper.

  The Cleveland painting, nearly seven and a half feet high, was made in the summer of the same year. According to its inscription, it depicts the Qianbian mountains, made famous by representations in paintings from the tenth and fourteenth centuries — the mere choice of the subject underscores Dong’s scholarly bent. This mountain is part of a low range located near the Yangzi river delta, but a viewer would be hard pressed to identify the subject from Dong’s rendering of it. In contrast to the other painting, this one connects the foreground and background through a peculiar mass of forms that suggest a particularly contorted mountain. It is impossible to reconcile the various shapes into any coherent set of relations. While the right side of the painting is fairly conventional, a twisted mass of shapes in the center of the painting looks like some sort of giant lichen, or perhaps a diseased kidney. It stands in different relation to each area — foreground, background, and right and left — with which it connects.

  Yet the painting succeeds as a kind of semiabstract landscape. For Dong, painting was more an expression of inner reality than of external form, and his rendering of the mountain could be thought to capture its essence without the distraction of its actual shape. According to James Cahill the painting’s “ambiguities and spacial disjunctures occur as warps within an imposing, absorbing landscape that can stand on its own as a major work of art.” Is it possible that such paintings reflect the dissolving of the old Confucian certainties in the newly commercialized late Ming society? “For a culture in which landscape paintings had always embodied concepts of natural order,” Cahill says, such works “must have had an impact that we can only partly understand and feel…. A painting like [Dong’s ‘Qingbian Mountain’] must have represented, for late Ming viewers, whether or not they recognized it consciously as such, an analogue in forms to their uneasy sense of irrationality and disorder pervading established institutions.” However that may be, “our perception of what constitutes ‘Chinese art,’” says Timothy Brook, “derives from Dong Qichang.”

  Clearing after Snow on Mountain Passes, 1635 (details), by Dong Qichang. Handscroll, ink on paper, 143 × 13 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

  Dong Qichang painted this landscape in the year of his death. According to his inscription, the painting is based on one by a tenth-century painter. In Dong’s version, however, the “forms respond to the distinctly non-physical forces of intellect and imagination,” according to scholar Howard Rogers. How easy is it to tell this is a winter and not an autumn landscape?

  “As a rule I never paint snow,” Dong Qichong said. “I let winter scenery take its place.” The reasons for Dong’s aversion to snow scenes are unclear — it could be that he simply wasn’t good at them, but Dong would probably say that including snow in a winter scene is a cheap trick: the true artist would convey the essence of the winter landscape without relying on simple surface appearances. At least one fellow painter, however, was unimpressed. He considered Dong’s winter landscapes indistinguishable from his autumn landscapes — they are only winter scenes, he said, “by definition.” To judge from the painting of “Clearing after Snow on Mountain Passes” that Dong made in 1635, the last year of his life, the criticism was not without merit.

  There was no lack of snow and cold to inspire the painters. During the time he was in China, Matteo Ricci reported, “Once winter sets in, all the rivers in northern China are frozen over so hard that navigation on them is impossible, and a wagon may pass over them.” Timothy Brook has sought to correlate climatic changes to political and social developments in China. Cold winters and drought during the late spring contributed to crop failures that resulted in widespread famine and death. The crop crisis undermined confidence in the government, and the population decline left China undermanned to defend itself against the Manchu invaders who would overthrow the dynasty before midcentury.

  Gazing at Snow along the Riverbank, 1616, by Li Liufang (1575–1629). Ink on gilded paper, 213 × 30 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Gift of Carol S. Brooks in honor of her father, George J. Schlenker, and R. T. Miller, Jr. Fund, 1997, AMAM 1997.29.4.

  Li Liufang was a member of the “Nine Friends of Painting,” a group of artists associated with Dong Qichang. Despite Dong Qichang’s reluctance to paint snow scenes, Li Liufang, like many other late Ming painters, was inspired to attempt the subject. In an inscription on this painting Li wrote, “On the fifth day before the Winter Solstice of the bingchen year [1616], I boarded a boat at Tangxi. As the cold rain turned to snow, I took a piece of gold-ground paper a friend had sent me and sketched this picture of gazing at snow along the riverbank.”

  Brook calls the period from 1615–1617 “The Second Wanli Slough,” a period of extreme environmental stress, characterized by cold, drought, famine, locusts, and — so the Chinese chroniclers report — unsettling encounters with dragons. It must have been a particularly uncomfortable time for Dong Qichong to be fleeing an irate mob of villagers.

  One of Dong’s greatest successes was in elaborating a theory of art based on the notion that his own technical limitations were precisely the indicators of a nobility of spirit that elevated such works above those of the merely competent. Generations of Chinese scholars would follow his lead. Yet, in the estimation of James Cahill, “Aside from Dong Qichang himself, none of the literati painter-critics who assert so forcibly the virtues of amateurism was himself a painter of any real stature.”

  Whether amateur or professional, few late Ming painters seemed to share Dong’s aversion to snow scenes. Several within his own circle tried their hand at the subject. Dong’s closest friend was the critic and calligrapher Chen Jiru, who was famous for having burnt his scholars’ robes after failing his examinations. Dong praised him for embodying amateur virtues, saying his paintings “do not fall into the realm of the professional painters … with their sweet, vulgar, and pernicious character.” The two men boated together, and Dong probably relied on Chen’s hospitality following the riot of 1616. After completing Clearing after Snow on Mountain Passes, Dong made preparations for his funeral and sent a final message to Chen. Chen too was interested in managing his end — his autobiography included an imagined account of his death. A snowy landscape in the Seattle Art Museum attributed to Chen is evidently a fake, but his inscriptions do appear on snow scenes by others. In China’s Xixi National Wetland Park there is an island with a building that retains the name Chen gave it. He called it the “Autumn Snow Hut.”

  Piled Snow on Cold Cliffs, 1616, by Zhao Zuo. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper. 76 × 211 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

  Zhao Zuo was one of several Chinese artists who painted snow scenes during the cold years of the early seventeenth century.

  Intense cold covered much of the globe. On a typical day in a small town in the Netherlands, sometime in the summer of 1616, the sun was hidden in haze. Pale light entering the Mute of Kampen’s studio cast few shadows. Kampen, located near where the river IJssel empties into the IJsselmeer (the “Zuiderzee”), was once a bustling commercial and agricultural town, but by 1616 it had been supplanted by Amsterdam, about sixty miles to its west.

  The artist Hendrick
Avercamp — who everyone simply called “the Mute” — rummaged through his collection of ink and watercolor drawings of stock characters drawn from the works of Flemish and Northern Dutch artists, such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hans Bol, and David Vinckboons, along with his own sketches from life. He was looking for figures for a painting featuring people from all levels of society enjoying a day on the ice. He would need a lot of them to complete his plan — a single one of his paintings could show more than a hundred people, and even as many as two hundred, each engaged in some particular activity on the ice. Many were skating. Some were playing a popular club-and-ball game called colf. Others were sailing ice yachts or pulling carts or selling goods from tents or ice fishing or simply falling down in a comical manner.

  It is impossible to know which of his paintings Avercamp was working on in 1616, because he rarely dated his works. A few can be roughly dated by costumery or architectural and landscape elements or just by stylistic considerations, but of many all that can be said is that they date from around 1610 to 1620. This was an active period for the artist, and he was certainly working on some ice scene in 1616, as such scenes make up the overwhelming preponderance of his work. One possibility is that he was painting the winter scene on a frozen canal that is currently among the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The painting was a partial gift from collector Hannah Carter, and the LACMA curators so esteemed it that in January 2010 they sold off seventeen European paintings and a terracotta sculpture in part to help fund its full acquisition. There are several other surviving paintings that could date from 1616, but the LACMA painting (which, for all we know, could be slightly earlier or later) can represent them all. Extraordinary as it is, in many ways it is typical of Avercamp’s work from this period.