This book selects 50 paintings from the National Palace Museum in Taipei, spanning thousands of years from the Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty. Each era is stated in a corresponding way, and the Tang and Five Dynasties, the Song Dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty correspond to each other as follows: figures and landscapes, realism and freehand, poetry and painting and calligraphy, vigor and elegance, tradition and innovation. In terms of the classification of cultural relics, there are not only well-known famous products, but also some important cultural relics that have not yet become popular, and the two are intertwined into a more comprehensive development context. The book includes both ancient paintings that are accurately dated, as well as works that have been repositioned only in recent times, such as Wu Yuanzhi's Red Cliff Diagram of the Jin Dynasty. It is hoped that through these 50 paintings, the outline of the history of Chinese painting will be constructed.
Flower Landscape Collection (First Half Volume)
In the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which inherited the old collection of the Qing Palace, compared with other calligraphers and painters in previous dynasties, Wang Hui and Yun Shouping in the "Four Kings Wu Yun" in the early Qing Dynasty should be called calligraphers and painters with a large number of works. As we all know, Yun Shouping first learned landscapes, but because of his self-humility and inability to compete with Wang Hui, he changed to flowers.
If you want to choose a work from the museum's collection to talk about the relationship between these two painters, Yun Shouping and Wang Hui's "Flower and Landscape Collection" should be the first choice. This set of albums was made in the 11th year of Kangxi (1672), the two were about 40 years old, in the prime of life, when they traveled to Yixing, Jiangsu Province when they made a collaborative painting, the first six are flowers painted by Yun Shouping, and the last six are Wang Hui's imitation of ancient landscapes. Among the six flowers painted by Yun, three of them have poems inscribed by Wang Hui, and they communicate frequently with each other and have deep feelings. Here we will focus on the flowers in the first half of the book.
Yun Shouping (1633-1690), a native of Wujin (now Changzhou, Jiangsu), was originally named Ge, and later used the word Xing, and the word Zhengshu, called Nantian. This set of albums is six in the order of Xinyi, peony, daylily, shoot, begonia, and narcissus, which are sorted by spring, summer, autumn and winter. A comparison of Yun Shouping's 1657 painting of the earliest extant boneless peony with the second opening of this volume shows that the Yun family inherited the boneless method of Xu Chongsi (active in the second half of the 10th century) and then participated in the new method developed by himself. In 1657, the fan was painted in a purely boneless way, without the use of the color line outlining technique. In this work in 1672, it can be seen that the three-color peony has its own way. The white peony is outlined with light juice green, and then dyed with white powder. The purple peony is rendered in a boneless freehand method, and then outlined with a darker purple color and dotted with white powder. As for the red peony, it is dyed alternately with rouge powder and pure rouge, and then dye it with rouge or white powder and water. As Fang Xun of the Qing Dynasty said: "Yun's dotted flowers, chalk with grease, and then repeated with dyeing brushes." Point dyeing is used together, and the predecessors have not passed on this method, which is its own creation. Such as chrysanthemums, impatiens, camellia flowers, fat dan are dyed from the petal head, and the painting method is different from the world. ”
Yun Shouping's painting method is between "freehand" and "fine brush", which can be both delicate and delicate, but also can be dyed freely, able to write, and also write and work. The most noteworthy thing is that peony is a common auspicious theme, and it is colored fresh and elegant, showing a gaudy and vulgar temperament. Looking at the Xinyi painted in the first opening, the painting method of the white flower is the same as that of the white peony introduced above, and the purple peach flower has a similar painting method to the purple peony. The other four daylilies, shoot dry, begonias, and narcissus are all painted in the same way, and the color changes are delicate, and the style is elegant and fresh. In order to bring out the white flowers, the flower outline is smudged with pale cyanine, and the layered blending gives the blank background a sense of space.
Finally, I want to talk about the sequence in a set of albums. In the "Flower and Landscape Collection", whether it is the flower paintings in the first half of the book - Xinyi, peony, daylily, shoot dry, begonia, narcissus, or the landscape paintings in the second half of the book are sorted according to spring, summer, autumn and winter. The last picture of a landscape album is often a snowy scene, with the earth covered in snow, which is very fitting for the end of flipping through an album.