Ming Ren Painting "Zhuge Liang Statue" (Nan Kaoru Dian Ben) Silk Coloring 192×95.6cm Collection of the National Museum of China
Transmission of Ming and Qing dynasty portraits
One of the most important features of Ming and Qing portrait painting is the transmission of mold writing and Chen Chen Xiangyin. Now let's take Zhuge Liang's portrait as an example to talk about this phenomenon.
According to the literature, the earliest zhuge liang statue was painted by Tang Yan Liben, but unfortunately, this zhuge liang statue is only recorded in the literature, and even the facsimile that has been handed down cannot be seen. Most of the zhuge liang statues seen now, except for some line drawings and stone carvings, most of them began to appear from the Ming Dynasty.
The earliest statue of Zhuge Liang in the collection of the National Museum of China was painted by the Ming Dynasty anonymous family and collected by the Nanxun Hall, which is also the earlier image of Zhuge Liang seen so far. After this painting, many zhuge liang images were basically written on this model. Another version of the Qingdian collection, Zhuge Liang's bust (actually a head portrait), is based on a full-body portrait, even the orientation of his head is the same, and the hat and the clothes used as accessories are also the same.
In the late Ming Dynasty, many literati participated in the creation of portraits, such as Zhang Dafeng, also known as Zhang Feng, a painter whom Zhang Daqian greatly admired (the reason why Zhang Daqian's name was "Dafengtang" was derived from his worship of Zhang Feng). Zhang Feng's Zhuge Liang statue is like placing Zhuge Liang on a wooden bed, a lupine scarf, and a full-body sitting portrait, which is the image of Zhuge Liang created by the literati.
In the Ming Dynasty, there was also a painter named Zhu Youyi, who created the "Reading Chart of Kong Ming". The figures, faces, costumes, etc. in this work are similar to the first Zhuge Liang statue mentioned above. However, the Composition of the "Reading Map of Kong Ming" painted by the Qing Dynasty is different from the composition of the "Reading Map of Kong Ming" painted by Zhu Youyi, and the background behind it is also different, but the character modeling is still the same blueprint, that is, the statue of Zhuge Liang collected by the National Museum of China.
Let's look at the Yuan Dynasty calligrapher and painter Zhao Mengfu. During the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, many people painted him. Judging from the images of Yu Zhiding in the early Qing Dynasty, Yu Ming in the late Qing Dynasty, and Zhao Mengfu in Shi Yun's pen during the Republic of China period, they actually come from the same facsimile, Yu Zhiding.
From the evolution of the portraits of Zhuge Liang and Zhao Mengfu, it is not difficult to see that most of the portraits of the Ming and Qing dynasties were transferred to the mold, with little originality, and most of them were copied on the basis of the blueprints drawn by predecessors. Of course, there are also a few works with different compositions, or different linings, or different character expressions, but in fact, the image, clothing and shape of the entire character are completely similar, which is the most important feature of Ming and Qing portraits.
Another painting of Zhao Mengfu in the National Museum of China was painted by the late Qing dynasty painter Ye Yanlan. If we cut off the part above the neck of the portrait, we will find that it is similar to Yu Zhiding, but Ye Yanlan creatively added some costumes, added civilian clothes, and painted a full-body portrait. Therefore, even if it is a full-body image, it can be seen that it comes from the same mother.
Ming Zhu Youyi's "Reading Diagram of Kong Ming" on silk 134×54.4cm Collection of the Capital Museum
Modeling and falsification of Ming and Qing portraits
After portrait painting arrived in the Qing Dynasty, the market demand was very extensive. Since its market demand is widespread, there are many counterfeiting phenomena. Thus, from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of portraiture forgeries appeared. Now take Zhao Zhiqian as an example to talk about the modeling and identification of Portrait Painting in the Qing Dynasty.
First of all, take a look at the original portrait of Zhao Zhiqian. Who was the first person to paint with Zhao Zhiqian? In the seventh year of Qing Tongzhi (1870), when Zhao Zhiqian was only 42 years old, he and a professional painter named Yang Xiuting saw each other in Hangzhou, Yang Zhiting specially painted a portrait of Zhao Zhiqian, and Zhao Xiaocun made some supplements to the costumes of the characters next to him, Zhu Songfu was responsible for mounting, and Zhao Zhiqian wrote for it: "The group destroyed, did not destroy me, I do not report it; or reputation, non-reputation I also, I am not good." Not as good as the painter, can look like me also. Those who know me say that I listen to them and laugh. "The gist of it is: Whether you say I'm good or bad, I don't care, but I'm very satisfied to be able to draw me, like Yang Xiting, who is very similar to me." Zhao Zhiqian writes very witty and humorous, but also shows that he is a character with mixed reputations.
This painting is the earliest of all the portraits of Zhao Zhiqian that have been seen so far, and was later engraved on a stone stele, which is now hidden in the stele pavilion of the Xiling Seal Society. And the stone carvings of Zhao Zhiqian here are the most original facsimiles of all his portraits we have seen.
A later facsimile was painted by the Japanese calligrapher Ninshi Nishikawa. Nishikawa Ning, also spelled Anshu and Jing min, was born in Tokyo and is a well-known Sinologist and calligraphy theorist in Japan. The third son of the Meiji-era calligrapher Nishikawa Haru-dong, he grew up loving Chinese calligraphy and then studying mathematics, and when he graduated with his ph.D. in 1960, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the history of calligraphy unearthed in the Western Regions on the history of calligraphy unearthed in the Jin Dynasty. Xi Chuanning's imitation of Zhao Zhiqian's portrait is actually only about the shape, and the appearance is far from the same, including the zhao zhiqian face he painted is already very different from the mother.
Then look at the white depiction of Zhao Zhiqian's portrait, which appears in one of Zhao Zhiqian's prints, "Guan Zi De Zhai Seal Collection". The portrait of Zhao Zhiqian in this case was copied by Ye Ming, one of the Eight Schools of Xiling, and the original copy of it is the earliest version of the stone carving mentioned above. Ye Ming's full name is Ye Weiming, the character plate is new, and the character pin is three, is a very famous epigrapher, one of the founders of the Xiling Printing Society, his most famous works are "Guangyin Ren Biography", as well as "Re-continuation of the Yinren Biography", "Erjin Butterfly Hall Seal Spectrum", "Supplementary Guangyin Ren Biography", "Jinshi Family Biography" and so on.
Comparing Ye Ming's imitation of Zhao Zhiqian with the blueprint, it will be found that what Ye Ming copied was only a bit similar, but the intrinsic spirit was far behind, and the text was also copied according to Zhao Zhiqian's text. Overall, there is a 60- or 70 percent similarity between the two.
A number of forgeries have emerged, one of which appeared at an auction in China Guardian in 2009. Of course, anyone who has not studied Zhao Zhiqian will take this work as his portrait, but this is obviously a fake, and even the words are all copied from Zhao Zhiqian, and the character image is far from his own, so this work is a derivative of a replica. In addition, there are some other nonsensical fakes.
It is said that Zhao Zhiqian has a seal called "Uncle Yu is not happy". His name is "Uncle 㧑", why is there such a party seal? This is due to an allusion that when Zhao Zhiqian was an official, his superiors did not pay any polishing fees after asking him for paintings. For this reason, Zhao Zhiqian was very unhappy, so anyone who took the painting from his home and did not pay for it, he stamped a side of the painting with the inscription "Uncle Is Not Happy". Later, when his superiors learned of this, they felt very embarrassed, so they asked their entourage to send the silver two to him, and Zhao Zhiqian immediately changed another painting and stamped it with a party seal "Uncle Happy" and gave it to his superior.
I once saw a painting at an auction with the seal "Uncle Yi is not happy", which proves that the above-mentioned anecdote that "Uncle Yi" is unhappy is true.
Qing Yu Zhiding's "Portrait of Zhao Mengfu" in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing
Look at another painter of Zhao Zhiqian's contemporaries: Wu Zhiqiu. Wu Zhiqiu painted another image of Zhao Zhiqian, that is, the image of Zhao Zhiqian walking. Zhao Zhiqian in the painting is relatively short, about 1.6 meters, slightly fat, holding a book. On the painting there is an inscription by Wu Zhiqiu: "A small portrait of Mr. Sorrowful Nunnery, Andi men Wu Zheng imagined it." "Mr. Sorrowful Nunnery" is Zhao Zhiqian's nickname. The reason why it is "imagining the picture" is because Wu Zhiqiu has not met Zhao Zhiqian himself, and when he painted this painting, Zhao Zhiqian had been dead for 35 years. This work is also a representative of Zhao Zhiqian's portrait, which is now in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum.
Taking Wu Zhiqiu's works as the mother, in 2010, an auction in Shanghai Boguzhai appeared a portrait of Zhao Zhiqian, entitled "Wu Zheng painted Zhao Zhiqian's portrait", careful comparison, it was found that this statue is actually a copy of the collection of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum, is a fake, but the inscription on the painting is true, the so-called fake painting real title, the inscription person may not understand the identification, and do not know where the most original mother of this work is.
When we are very familiar with a certain work, many of the fakes derived from it can be seen. This is a point to pay special attention to when studying portraiture in the late Qing Dynasty, and it is also a point to pay special attention to when engaging in art research.
Not long ago, I read an article in a journal studying portraiture in the late Qing Dynasty, and found that the evidence cited and many of the portraits were fakes. When we do art history research, we should pay special attention to the fact that when selecting images, it is very important to identify images. Because when the object of your study itself is a fake, all the conclusions that come out of the study, no matter how well the evidence is, how detailed the information, the final conclusion is wrong, the selected image is a fake, followed by nonsense.
When I was compiling the Journal of the National Museum of China, I received a submission from a well-known scholar at a university about a calligraphy work of Mi Fu. If you simply look at this article, it can be said that there is nothing wrong with it - whether it is his arguments, arguments, or methods of doing scholarship, academic norms, they all reach the level of well-known scholars. However, one of the fatal mistakes of this manuscript is that the image it cites is a recognized fake of rice, so the final conclusion of this paper can only be laughed at.
When studying Ming and Qing portraits, it should also be noted that this kind of one true and one false can be compared. For example, if you compare the above-mentioned "Wu Zheng Painting Zhao Zhiqian Portrait" with the real handwriting, you will find that they are very typical twin works. However, the birth era of the two works is different, the era of the original work is earlier, and the forgery is in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China.
From this, it can be concluded that when studying portraiture, we must first pay attention to its parent, that is, the most primitive blueprint. Portraits often have many facsimiles outside of the mother book, and even derive many imitations and fakes. The function of the mother book is to spread and retain, and imitations and fakes are to make profits. It can be seen from the facsimiles, imitations, and fakes of Zhao Zhiqian's portraits that in the late Qing Dynasty, when portraiture was at its peak, it was an important part of the study of portraiture to identify falsification and authenticity.
Qing Ye Yanlan's "Portrait of Zhao Mengfu" collection of the National Museum of China
The focus of Ming and Qing portrait paintings is to distinguish between the mother and the mother
In the study of portrait painting in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the most important point is to distinguish between the mother text, that is, to distinguish the most primitive base book. I am recently studying the portrait of Dong Qichang. Because there are many people who paint him - from contemporaries to Zeng Whale in the late Ming Dynasty, Wu Jun in the late Qing Dynasty, and many anonymous people have also painted his portraits. When you find the original version, you will find that many portraits can be found by following the vine. Ye Gongqi once said that there are many sources of portraiture, including special references to the collection of ancestral idols, the supplement of xingle pictures or posthumous collections, and the circulation of photography. Of course, circulating photography mainly refers to the late Qing Dynasty.
In the case of Portrait of Liang Dingfen, this work should come from photography or a sketch of the scene. The author, Shen Tang, may have met Liang Dingfen himself, at least seen a picture of Liang Dingfen. There are already many photos in Liang Dingfen's time, such as Li Hongzhang, Zeng Guofan, Cixi, Guangxu, etc. There are many photos left behind, so many painters can paint on the photos, which comes from circulating photography, which is indeed well-founded.
In Ming and Qing portrait paintings, there is also a phenomenon pointed out by the calligraphy and painting expert Xu Bangda, that is, some portraits are often transformed by people, or the nameless painters are changed to famous. Many portraits in the Ming Dynasty are modelless, and sometimes in order to raise the value of this work, the market adds a paragraph to the painting, such as Zeng Whale or Yu Zhiding, Gu Jianlong and other famous painters, so that it becomes a masterpiece from a non-style work. Special attention should be paid to the fact that such paintings are open paintings and the models are forgeries.
There is also a case where the nameless person in the painting is changed to a big celebrity. In the portrait, it may be a completely unknown person, and in order to make a profit and increase its commercial value, the collector adds an inscription next to it saying that the person in the painting is a very famous person in history. Therefore, whether it is to change the money or change the person, or to dig up the money to make up for the scenery, this is an important feature of the calligraphy and painting falsification in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and special attention should be paid to it.
The prosperity and reasons for ming and qing portraiture
If you avoid a large number of sacrificial portraits created by folk painters, specific to the Ming and Qing dynasties, you can see the difference in the style of celebrity portrait painting of the two dynasties: the Ming Dynasty is more focused on realism, is a video-style painting style, basically one-to-one, or is completely realistic painting style; Qing Dynasty portraiture is more focused on freehand, is the literati feast, self-entertainment style of painting style. Of course, there may also be a small amount of freehand in realistic portraiture, and there may also be a small amount of realism in freehand portraits. But in general, Ming Dynasty portraits are basically realistic, while Qing Dynasty portraits are basically freehand.
In Ming and Qing portraits, the concept of similar art is brought to the extreme. In the practical social function of the Ming and Qing portraits, they focus on "writing shapes in shape", this kind of realistic heavy form creation concept is the value orientation of the vast majority of professional painters in the Ming and Qing dynasties, but also their inevitable choice to adapt to the needs of the audience, so when discussing Ming and Qing portraits, we should pay special attention to their creative concept - "shaped". In the Republic of China, most of the portraits after 1949 were written about gods, and later developed into portraits with a comic nature, which exaggerated the approximate outline of people and captured a person's charm, which was very different from Ming and Qing portraits.
There are also portraits since the Ming and Qing dynasties, especially after the middle and late Qing Dynasty, many portraits have become part of the elegant halls of the literati. The American scholar Gao Juhan, who once did a special study on this topic, mentioned that the reason why photo painting unexpectedly jumped to the level of serious art in the 17th century may have begun as a confluence of two dynamics: on the one hand, it was due to the attention of this era, more and more attention was paid to the development of personality; on the other hand, it was due to the artistic creation techniques introduced to China from Europe. For example, Zeng Whale paid more attention to the individual characteristics of the images in painting than in the previous Chinese painting tradition, so this argument should be said to be more in line with the development history of Chinese portraiture from the 17th century to the 19th century.
Since the 17th century, many literati have participated in the creation, or portraits created with literati as the main body, and gradually entered the ranks of literati paintings, such as a large number of literati paintings in many "Xingle Tu", which is also a factor to pay attention to when discussing the aesthetic connotation of Ming and Qing portraits.
Qi Baishi's "Fifty-year-old Portrait of Qinyuan Master" is colored on paper 65.3×37.5cm Collection of Liaoning Provincial Museum
If you make a horizontal comparison between portrait painting and the landscape painting, flower and bird painting of the time, you will find that after the 17th century, landscape painting and flower and bird painting declined. The reason for its decline was the gradual transformation of the paintings of the time from literati to secularization, and later slowly became the paintings of the common sense of elegance. In particular, it is represented by the very typical painting styles of "Hai School" and "Beijing-Tianjin Painting School" and "Lingnan School".
By the 19th century, there was a proverb circulating in society: "Gold-faced silver flowers, beg for food, paint landscapes." The meaning of this sentence is that if you paint a face (portrait) you can get gold, if you paint flowers you can get silver, and those who paint landscapes can only be beggars. It can be seen that the decline of landscape painting and the relative prosperity of portrait painting in the late Qing Dynasty can be seen.
Qi Baishi is a typical example. He lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his early artistic survival was based on portraiture, which at that time was dedicated to painting portraits, which was described in his autobiography. In the early days, Qi Baishi especially liked to paint landscapes, mainly to learn the "Four Kings", calligraphy to learn He Shaoji, painting also learned He Shaoji's grandson He Weipu, etc., all of which were learning the traditional way. But he later found that there was almost no market for landscape painting, and portrait paintings were generally ordered, and even some people were in urgent need of their families, such as an elder who died in a certain family, and immediately asked him to sketch on the remains, and after the painting, the other party immediately paid. In Xiangtan at that time, Qi Baishi made a lot of money by this, but after making money, he was known to the bandits at that time and was ready to go to their house to rob it. Fortunately, one of Qi Baishi's relatives in the bandits gave him a message in advance, so he had to flee to Beijing, which was 1917. Therefore, when we study Qi Baishi, we often joke that we should thank the bandits in Xiangtan, without them, there might not be today's Qi Baishi, he will paint this portrait for others in the local area all his life, and live a carefree and prosperous life. Qi Baishi could not have gone to Beijing, there would have been no later decay and change method, and naturally there would be no famous art master of the 20th century as we know it now. Of course, this is all an afterthought.
Although Qi Baishi inherited the tradition of portraiture in the late Qing Dynasty, it was different from Ren Bonian's freehand portraiture. Qi Baishi uses charcoal brushes or sketching techniques to paint the facial expressions of the characters, and uses traditional characters to draw lines and various line drawings to paint the costumes of the characters, forming a portrait, especially like the portrait of the virtual valley. There are also many famous portraits of him, such as the "Fifty-Year-Old Portrait of The Master of Qinyuan", which is now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, which is a representative work of Qi Baishi's portrait painting. From Qi Baishi's portraits, we can roughly see the living conditions and transmutation styles of portraits in the late Qing Dynasty, which can also be said to be the epitome of portraiture at that time.
On September 22, 2020, Zhu Wanzhang, a research librarian at the National Museum of China, gave a lecture entitled "Transmission and Transformation Of Ming and Qing Portrait Paintings and Identification" at the Forbidden City Research Institute
Published in the February 2021 issue of Art Market