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Five generations of painter Dong Yuan's "Xiaoxiang Tu"
Dong Yuan (?-c. 962) was a Chinese painter of the Five Dynasties of the Southern Tang Dynasty. Dong Yuan (陳元), also spelled Shuda, was a native of Zhongling, Jiangxi (present-day Jinxian County, Nanchang, Jiangxi), and called himself a "Jiangnan native". The year of birth and death is unknown, but the main activity was during the Southern Tang Dynasty (934-960). Li Jing, the lord of the Southern Tang Dynasty, was then the deputy envoy of Beiyuan, so he was also known as "Dong Beiyuan", and after the death of southern Tang, he entered the Song Dynasty and was regarded as the founding master of southern landscape painting. In the history of painting, Dong Yuan, Fan Kuan, and Li Cheng are called the three masters in the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty.
"Xiao Xiang Tu" Volume Five Generations Dong Yuan Silk Color 50cmx141.4cm Collection of the Palace Museum
"Xiaoxiang Tu" depicts the scenery of Jiangnan. The author takes the gentle mountains of Jiangnan as the theme, taking the scenery of Pingyuan, a light boat floating on the river, and the greeters on the river are moving forward. The foot of the slope in the middle scene is painted with a large area of dense forest, covering several farmhouses; between the foot of the slope and the river, there are several people pulling nets to catch fish, full of life. The paintings of mountains and mountains, dark clouds, and trees and stones are shrouded in ethereal haze, appearing plain and deep, vast and deep. There are several groups of characters on the shore boats, and there are fishermen and boats with nets down the slopes in the distance. This painting is light and moist with flowers and blues, light and moist, the mountain stones are dyed with pens, and the bottom of the hillside is covered with hemp, which looks thick and moist, and the grass and trees of the Jiangnan landscape are flourishing and lush. The whole volume is interwoven with dot lines, the horizontal lines of Tingzhu appear to stretch freely, the hemp and dots constitute the transverse veins of the mountains and the undulating peaks, and the ink dots are thickened and light, and the light dots are dyed, creating a thin smoke cloud between the qinglan, and the humid and warm Jiangnan climate comes out spontaneously. The dot scene characters use white powder and blue and red colors, protruding from the silk surface, clear and harmonious. There is no print on this canvas. This figure was identified by Dong Qichang in the Ming Dynasty and believed to be the authentic handiwork of Dong Yuan. There is an inscription on Dong Qichang's book at the beginning, Wang Duoba across the water at the back, and Dong Qichang's second and Yuan Shuba in the back. Zhu Wen Banfang of the "Ceremonial Chronicle Ofs" zhu Wen Banfang, Qing Bian Yongyu, An Qi, Jiaqing, Xuantong Inner House and other seals. Dong Yuan's landscape paintings had a great influence on the literati paintings of later generations, and Guo Ruoxuan of the Song Dynasty said in the "Picture Seeing and Hearing Zhi" that Dong Yuan's painting method was "ink wang wei, coloring like Li Sixun", which was highly evaluated.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the "Xiaoxiang Tu" was handed to the collection of Yuan Shu in Henan by Dong Qichang. In chongzhen noon (1642), Yuan Shu's hometown of Suizhou City was invaded, and tens of thousands of books in the first library of Yuan Keli (Yuan Shu's father) ShangshuFu were destroyed, and only a few frames of travel thousands of miles back and forth for Yuan Shu to carry him to Hushu in Jiangsu province to avoid the disaster of war, which was actually a good story in the history of famous painting collections in China and even the world. The painting was stored in the Inner Palace during the Qing Dynasty, and Puyi was brought to Changchun when he left the palace, and was scattered among the people after the War of Resistance Against Japan. In 1952, it was donated by a generation of masters Zhang Daqian to the Chinese government and has been admitted to the Palace Museum in Beijing. There are "Yuan Shu Private Seal" (Heavy One), "Yuan Shu's Seal" (Heavy One), and "Suiyang Yuan Family Collection Secretary". Ming "Yuan Shu Appreciation" calligraphy and painting chapters, "Yuan Shu Seal Letter", "Bo Ying" and other imprints. This is a landscape painting depicting personnel activities, with a flat slope of sand moraine, a desolate reed, and a number of characters on the shore of Jiangnan Shuize Ting, standing and blowing to welcome the visitors on the boat; the background water surface is wide, the mountains are lush, and there are fishing boats.
Regarding the theme of this picture, there is no exact conclusion at present, but from the analysis of painting method and artistic conception, it is indeed a model of "plain and innocent, a piece of Jiangnan". The mountain rises from the beginning of the volume, with the flower blue transport ink hook, do not need to wear hemp and use the dots, in order to show the depth of perspective, the small mounds on the mountains from near to far from large to small, from sparse to dense, ink dots also have dense and thick changes, showing a dense and complex distant tree posture. The mountain hollow leaves a misty mist, creating a feeling of mist and distance. The trees in the vicinity are also expressed by ideas, but the image given by the idea situation has changed into a whole tree into a leaf, and the trees are lined up in rows, and the heights and heights of the near and far are jagged, and the fishing village huts are faintly exposed in the forest. The reeds are painted slightly slender, but they still don't get rid of the impression. The whole depiction, looking at the near trees and distant mountains from a distance, is full of ideas, which is dazzling. The water surface is white and black, but through the interspersed and thick and light changes of the slope and the mountain pass, its form and hue produce deep and shallow changes, and the mountains and rivers are beautiful, with a very intoxicating artistic charm.
Dong Yuan was a famous painter during the Sui and Tang dynasties, and had a profound influence on the history of Chinese art. There are very few surviving works of his, and there are only three in China, which are in the collections of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Shanghai Museum and the Liaoning Provincial Museum. This "Xiaoxiang Picture Scroll" is the only authentic work of Dong Yuan in the collection of the Forbidden City, which belongs to the first-class first-class cultural relics and is extremely precious.
Dong Yuan is not only known for painting landscapes, but also cattle, tigers, dragons and figures. As a landscape painter, Dong Yuan is also not specific. The Song people praised his large color landscape scenery as rich, like Li Sixun style. But its most original and accomplished is the ink landscape. He used the method of phi ma ma and moss to express the natural features of jiangnan, and mysteriously conveyed the scenery of Jiangnan with obscure peaks, shaded by zhouzhu and smokey forests. He uses a very sloppy pen, his myopia is almost nothing like objects, and his distant view is full of scenery, and he is creative in technique. His famous works "Xia Jing Shan Pass To Be Crossed" and "Xiao Xiang Tu" vividly express the specific scenery of the hills of Jiangnan in summer, the lush grass and trees between the rivers and lakes, and the clouds. His pen and ink technique is fully adapted to the specific scenery he represents.
Shen Kuo of the Song Dynasty said that he "wrote more about the true mountains of Jiangnan, not for the strange and steep strokes". Most of the mountain shapes depicted are hills along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, most of which are undulating slopes, earthy mountains and stones, and rarely make steep and absolute shapes. This is in stark contrast to the majestic northern mountain shape represented by Jing Hao earlier than him. Dong Yuan attaches great importance to the portrayal of the dot scene characters in landscape paintings, always with the plot of genre painting, sometimes it is actually the theme of the whole painting. Although the shape is small, simple and solid, the characters are set up with heavy colors such as blue, red, and white, which are set off with the ink dots, and do not spare a kind of ancient fun. His heirloom works also include "Dragon Su Suburban People's Map" and so on.
Dong Yuan's creation of the new method of ink landscape painting was followed by the monk Juran at that time, and later generations called Dong Ju together. In the Song Dynasty, in addition to Mi Fu and Shen Kuo's great appreciation of the Dong Ju school, the general theorists did not have a high evaluation of Dong Ju. In the Yuan Dynasty, the trend of taking the Fa Dong Ju gradually opened. Tang Gao believes that "Tang painted landscapes to the beginning of the Song Dynasty, such as (Dong) Yuan is above the princes", and has a new understanding of Dong Yuan. The Four Houses of the Late Yuan Dynasty and the Wumen Sect of the Ming Dynasty even regarded Dong Yuan as a model, and although the "Southern and Northern Sects" commentators in the late Ming Dynasty theoretically honored Wang Wei as the "Southern Sect Painting Ancestor", in fact they were referring to Dong Yuan in the ancestral account. Huang Gongwang of the Yuan Dynasty said: "Those who make landscapes and rivers must take Dong as their teacher, such as Du Ye, who learns poetry." Wang Jian of the Qing Dynasty said, "If there is Dong Ju in painting, there is King Chung in the book, and if it is abandoned, it is a foreign way." Dong Yuan was able to exert such a profound influence in later generations, which is rare in the history of Chinese landscape painting.