painting; handscroll BM-1980-0225-0.4

Period:Unknown Production date:18thC(late)
Materials:silk
Technique:painted
Subjects:literature
Dimensions:Height: 24.60 centimetres Width: 502.90 centimetres

Description:
Painting, handscroll. Earthly Paradise in Wuling; story of Peach Blossom Spring; cherry blossoms in bloom in rocky mountains; villagers in village and in fields; blue-and-green landscape style. Ink, colour and gold on silk. Signed and sealed.
IMG


Comments:Since this handscroll ends with a reproduction of the signature and seal of the celebrated Ming artist Qiu Ying (d. 1552?), followed by one of Buncho’s own seals, Buncho may have been working directly from a painting by the earlier master.In the legend of ‘Peach Blossom Spring’, a fisherman of Wuling travels up a stream lined with flowering peach trees, and at the stream’s source finds a cave leading to a hidden valley where the inhabitants enjoy bountiful harvests and perpetual health, and remain blissfully unaware of the outside world. The legend is known especially through a poem by the classical Chinese poet Tao Yuanming (365–427). Qiu Ying, and Tani Buncho after him, set the story in a vast panorama of mountains in the archaic ‘blue and green’ (‘qinglu’) landscape style. Buncho’s painstaking, highly decorative manner distinguishes his version from Chinese depictions.FURTHER READING Tochigi Prefectural Art Museum, ‘Edo nanga no soshi: Tani Buncho’, Tochigi, 1979.See also:Tokyo Tochigi Prefectural Art Museum (Tochigi Kenritsu Bijutsukan), ‘Shazanro Tani Buncho’, Utsunomiya, 1979, no. 4.Kono, Motoaki, “Tani Buncho” (‘Nihon no bijutsu no. 257’), Tokyo, 1987, no. 65. Hizo Nihon bijutsu taikan Vol 2Although the present painting can hardly be called a literal interpretation of Dao Yuanming’s ‘Peach Blossom Spring Record’ – the original source for ideas of an ideal realm existing apart from the world of everyday affairs – in its general outlines it is extremely close. The scene, for example, in which a fisherman abandons his boat and goes into a small cave in a hillside is explicitly shown in the picture scroll (Color Plate 30-3). The signed inscription at the end of the scroll shows that this is a copy by Tani Buncho of a work by the Ming painter Qiu Ying (c. 1494-c. 1552). There is in fact a Qiu Ying painting of the ‘Willing Peach Blossom Spring’ in the possession of the Chicago Art Institute, and a comparison of the two works reveals a basic similarity in their compositions. They are not, of course, completely identical, but the original of the present work was beyond doubt some ‘Earthly Paradise in Wuling’ such as this. Qiu Ying studied under Zhou Chen, a painter living in the same district, and developed his own style by copying outstanding Tang and Song paintings. His speciality was a painstakingly detailed, decorative style in which attractive young women and their maidservants were set in brilliant blue-and-green landscapes.The present scroll is typical of this so-called “blue-and-green landscape” style in which, basically, distant hills and peaks are done in a dark greenish-blue, while rocks and lower slopes closer at hand are done in lighter greens. Contours of hills and fissures in the rocks are done with fine, clear lines, with additional contour lines added in gold paint. Here, the pink and Chinese white of the peach blossoms stand out with striking freshness and beauty against the background of contrasting blues and greens. Buncho, more than any of the other Japanese Nanga painters, was fond of doing this kind of landscape.