OF ART

HISTOR'

PH0EBUS 2
A JOURNAL OF ART HISTORY

PUBLISHED BY:
ART HISTORY FACULTY
DEPARTMENT OF ART
COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
TEMPE, ARIZONA 85281

EDITORIAL BOARD
James Ballinger
Jack Breckenridge
Sherly Farness
J. Douglas Hale
Copyright © Arizona Board of Regents, 1978, 1979

Design by Ruben James Murioz
Graphic Design Workshop
Department of Art
College of Fine Arts
Arizona State University

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in its programs or
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PREFACE
In 1978 the faculty of art history at Arizona State University decided to prove
that art history was alive and well in the Southwest by producing PHOEBUS I, an
annual journal of papers on the history of art. This present issue, PHOEBUS II, is
dedicated to the same goals as the first issue.
We continue to concern ourselves with the excellent collections of art, public
and private, to be found in this region. Our second goal, the desire to serve as a focus for
research and publication by drawing together other institutions in this area, also has
been achieved. This year the Phoenix Art Museum has offered to share part of the cost of
PHOEBUS II. We appreciate this support and we look forward to a continuing association with the Phoenix Art Museum as well as with other institutions in the region.
While PHOEBUS II is published in Arizona, it is anything but parochial in
outlook as a reading of the Table of Contents demonstrates. In fact, two of our contributors are at this moment involved in research projects on opposite sides of the world.
We are proud of the time span of the articles which extends backward to
ancient Greece and forward to "only yesterday." In subsequent issues we expect to
increase this breadth of subject matter to reflect Arizona State University's developing
programs in Islamic art and the art of the American Indian.
No publication of this sort is the work of one or even a few people. PHOEBUS
II is published because of the support of many people; the contributors, of course, and the
Editorial Board. Beyond that, there has been the continuous support of the University
administration, especially the Chair of the Department, Leonard Lehrer, and the Dean of
the College of Fine Arts, Jules Heller.
PHOEBUS II owes its physical appearance to Ruben J. Munoz of the Graphic
Design Workshop, Art Department, College of Fine Arts, who has served as art director
and has guided this issue through the printing process.
Jack D. Breckenridge
Editor
3

CONTRIBUTORS
Jack Breckenridge
is a Professor of Art at Arizona State University. He studied with
Hans Hofmann in New York in 1952, the Saugatuck Summer School and
has degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of
Iowa (MFA), where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. His current interests are
American and European painting after World War II.

Claudia Brown
was a visiting Lecturer in East Asian art at Arizona State University for the
spring semester of 1979. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas
working in the field of Chinese painting of the Yuan dynasty.

Ju-Hsi Chou
is a Professor of Art at Arizona State University. He received
his Ph.D. from Princeton University. A specialist in later Chinese, he has
published articles dealing with Ming and Ch'ing artists and art theory. He is
presently in Japan (1979) studying Chinese art in Japanese collections.
4

Sherly Farness
is an Assistant Professor of Art at Arizona State University.
She received her MA degree from Michigan State University
and specializes in ancient and classical art.

Anthony Lacy Gully
is an Associate Professor of Art at Arizona State University. He received
his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His writings have been primarily
devoted to British art of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries.
He is currently (Spring, 1979) on sabbatical leave in Great Britain.

Mildred Monteverde
is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Southern
Colorado. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California at
Los Angeles in Precolumbian-Early Colonial art history and a post-doctoral
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship to study
the archaeology of Southwestern United States and Mexico. Her study
of the Indigenous Art and Architecture of the Southwest is forthcoming.

Donald Rabiner
is an Assistant Professor of Art at Arizona State University. He
received his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas. His publications
have been devoted to the study of painting in Southern Italy
in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries.

Rosalind Robinson
is a graduate student in art history at Arizona State University
specializing in nineteenth century France. She holds a B.A. degree
in French from Wheaton College (Mass.).

Vicki C. Wright
is a graduate student in art history at Arizona State University. She was the
recipient of an Arizona State University Graduate Fellowship for the 1977-78
academic year and currently serves as a Teaching Assistant in art history.

Winberta Yao
is an Associate Librarian in the Reference Service of the Arizona State
University Library and is the Subject Specialist in Art. She was
formerly Librarian at the Phoenix Art Museum. Her degrees are from the
University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University.
5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

8

The Problem of ANTISOLIA4ENISMO in Neapolitan
Baroque Painting
DONALD RABINER

17

Mid-Fourteenth Century Painting in Suchou:
Some Lesser Masters
CLAUDIA BROWN

31

A Re-examination of the Cult of Demeter and the
Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries
SHERLY FARNESS

39

ARIZONA PORTFOLIO

54

An Unpublished ROWLANDSON Sketchbook
ANTHONY LACY GULLY

75

Are We Ready For Shih t ao?
JU-HSI CHOU

88
A Conversation Between Adolph Gottlieb and
Jack Breckenridge transcribed by Jack Breckenridge

97

Three Recent Art Reference Books

THE PROBLEM OF
ANTISOLIMENISMO IN
NEAPOLITAN
BAROQUE PAINTING
Donald Rabiner

In the neglected field of Neapolitan Baroque painting crude simplifications
and critical misconceptions abound.1 Nowhere is this more true than for the period from
around 1690 to 1725, decades whose richness and diversity often is obscured by attempts
to interpret every stylistic tendency in terms of the art of Francesco Solimena. According
to the traditional view, now largely discredited, Solimena was the unique painter of
consequence in Naples following the death of Luca Giordano, and consequently the
nature of the "Neapolitan School" could be adequately characterized by his works alone.2
Recent years have seen the publication of monographic studies of a number of Solimena's
contemporaries, as well as several .notable attempts to synthesize a more complete and
accurate history of the period? Even to those Italian scholars whose work takes into
consideration such re-evaluations of the period, however, Solimena still looms as the
overwhelmingly dominant personality of the early Settecento in Naples. The distinct
personal styles of such recently rediscovered painters as Giacomo del Po, Domenico
Antonio Vaccaro and Francesco Peresi still are considered primarily in relation to the art
of Solimena, and contrary to the evidence of style and the testimony of contemporary
records, most painters who cannot readily be classified as followers of Solimena are
grouped into the vague and ill-conceived category of antisolimeneschi.
The tendency to view the painters of this period in terms of the polarity
between solimeneschi and antisolimeneschi originated in the catalogue essay prepared
by Costanza Lorenzetti for the major exhibition of Neapolitan Baroque and 19th century
painting held in Naples in 19385 In her analysis of the mature style of Giacomo del Po —
who to this day remains the central figure among the so-called antisolimeneschi —
Lorenzetti noted with interest "il suo evolversi al Settecento senza concordia di intenti
col caposcuola napoletana."5 In thus recognizing that in Naples during the early
18th century there worked an important painter whose style was unrelated to that of
Solimena, Lorenzett^had set forth the initial premise of a conceptual framework within
which all future considerations of the period would lie. As her analysis gained general
8

acceptance the acknowledgement of del Po's stylistic distinctness from Solimena gradually evolved into the belief that his mature style reflected a conscious opposition to
Solimena's art. There further developed the notion that far from being alone in his
opposition to Solimena, del Po was but the earliest representative of the organized forces
of antisolimenismo in the opening years of the 18th century. As early as 1950, for
example, in an exhibition catalogue jointly prepared by Ferdinando Bologna and
Raffaello Causa, del Po was seen as the first of many exponents of "la grande
pittura settecentesca napoletana, antisolimenesca ed antidemuriana."6 More recently,
in perhaps the most extreme expression of this view, Nicola Spinosa has adopted
the phraseology of military historians to describe what he has termed the fronda
antisolimenesca1 Battle-lines of the early 18th century, whose historical existence has
yet to be demonstrated, have been carefully drawn by modern scholars whose sympathies
most often lie with the "opponents" of Francesco Solimena.
This historically inaccurate view of the early Settecento in Naples rests upon
two fundamental misconceptions. First is the belief that already by 1705, the year of Luca
Giordano's death, Solimena was perceived by his contemporaries as an overwhelmingly
dominant caposcuola. Second is the opinion that the styles of the so-called antisolimeneschi were clearly antagonistic to that of Solimena and just as clearly related one to the
next. The fallacy of this latter point can be demonstrated rapidly by an examination of
some of the styles in question. The first point, which hinges upon our understanding of
"perceptions" in the early 18th century, requires more lengthy consideration.
Paintings from Solimena's maturity, such as the imperious Self-Portrait
(Naples, Museo Nazionale) of about 1730 (fig. 1), reveal a type of Late Baroque Classicism which is deeply rooted in Neapolitan traditions of the Seicento. The forms are
tightly painted, and a strong chiaroscuro produces broad sculptural volumes which
anchor the composition and render it stable. The emphatic frontality of the head, together with a carefully balanced system of countervailing diagonals, reduces what little
movement is suggested by the undulant pockets of the drapery folds. Between this
painting and a characteristic work by Giacomo del Po, such as his Apollo and Glory with
Jupiter and Juno (Salzburg, Residenzgalerie) of about 1723 (fig. 2), the contrast could not
be greater. Del Po's style, with its fluid, streaming brushwork and (at this late stage in
the painter's career) its shimmering palette of pale blues and creamy golds, clearly is
unrelated to that of Solimena. Whether such difference implies opposition, and hence
antisolimenismo, is a question that cannot be answered through visual analysis alone.
The styles of other painters who are ranged among the antisolimeneschi at
times display more significant parallels with Solimena's art than with that of del Po.
Important in this regard is Paolo De Matteis, whose initial training under Luca Giordano
has obscured his profound sympathies with the classicizing milieu of Carlo Maratta and
his followers in Rome. De Matteis' Hercules at the Crossroads (Leeds, Temple Newsome
House), painted in 1711 on commission from Lord Shaftesbury (fig. 3), is hardly the sort
of work one would expect from an artist who was programatically opposed to the style of
Francesco Solimena. De Matteis eschews Solimena's pronounced chiaroscuro, but his
composition and the high moral tone of his theme8 reveal a personality far more in tune
with Solimena's conservatism than with the secular gracefulness of del Po. A similar
disparity between recent classifications and actual stylistic affinities can be found in the
works of other painters said to be prominent in the anti-Solimenesque movement, most
notably Domenico Antonio Vaccaro and Nicola Malinconico.9
Modern scholars no doubt are correct in asserting, despite their apparent
distaste for his mature style, that Francesco Solimena was the most accomplished
painter active in Naples in the early 18th century. The point at issue, however, does not
concern the undeniably high quality of Solimena's oeuvre, but rather the extent to which
he did in fact dominate his age. Only when it is seen that Solimena's preeminence in
Naples during the early 18th century is largely a historical fabrication, and that prior to
10

2
Giacomo del Po, Apollo and Glory with Jupiter and Juno. c. 1723. Salzburger
Landessammlungen-Residenzgalerie.
11

about 1725 he was viewed as but one of several important painters in that city, can the art
of his foremost Neapolitan contemporaries be considered on its own terms. At question is
the extent to which, in the first quarter of the 18th century, Solimena was actually
perceived as the Neapolitan caposcuola.
The first indication that Solimena was thought to hold a dominant position in
his adopted city came only in 1733, with the publication of the second Neapolitan edition
of P.A. Orlandi's Abecedario pittorico.10 The opening, unpaginated section of this work
contains an encomiastic dedication to Solimena, written by Niccolo Parrino, together
with a brief life of the artist and a collection of laudatory messages from several of his
major patrons. This material clearly indicates Solimena's important stature, both within
Naples and throughout Europe, in the same ambient which saw in Rome the ascendency
of Francesco Trevisani, Benedetto Luti and other heirs to the Late Baroque Classicism of
Carlo Maratta. It must be noted, however, that by 1733 many prominent Neapolitan
painters of the early Settecento were no longer living, while artists of the following
generation, such as Francesco De Mura, had only just embarked upon their mature
careers. For a brief period following the deaths of Giacomo del Po, Nicola Malinconico and
Paolo De Matteis, all during the 1720's,11 Solimena was, incontestably, the dominant
figure in Neapolitan painting.
Published sources dating from before the 1733 edition of Orlandi's Abecedario
suggest that during the first three decades of the 18th century Solimena's stature was no
greater than that of at least two other painters: Paolo De Matteis and Giacomo del Po.
Solimena's works, like theirs, were recorded in local guidebooks and were the subject of
an occasional comment by a visiting traveller, but nowhere was the artist singled out for
praise as the Neapolitan caposcuola. Moreover, the bibliography of early 18th century
sources for the paintings of Solimena is no more ample than those for his two foremost
contemporaries.
Although Solimena's dominant position in Neapolitan painting from the
1730's onward was first acknowledged in the 1733 edition of Orlandi's Abecedario, the
overriding importance later accorded his art stems in large part from the historical
framework for the period that was created by the biographer Bernardo De Dominici. In
his Vite of the 17th and early 18th century artists of Naples, published in 1743,12 De
Dominici succeeded in setting back the moment of Solimena's emergence as the preeminent Neapolitan painter to 1705, the year of Luca Giordano's death. De Dominici viewed
the history of Neapolitan painting from the mid 17th century until his own day as a
continuum in which there reigned first Luca Giordano, and then Francesco Solimena.
His assessment of Giordano's position was essentially correct, for Luca had been universally recognized since the 1670's as the foremost painter of Naples. In attributing a
similar position to Solimena, however, De Dominici seems to have acted largely out of
personal considerations. Although today he is remembered solely as the author of the
Vite of Neapolitan artists, De Dominici was also a modestly talented painter, and may
well have received his initial training in Solimena's large and well-organized studio.13
His desire to elevate his presumed teacher to the rank of a Luca Giordano, and to see
Solimena as the direct and immediate successor to Giordano as the Neapolitan caposcuola, can thus be understood in terms of his own commitment as a painter to the type of
Late Baroque Classicism which characterized Solimena's mature style.
In recent years it has become fashionable to criticize De Dominici for the
unreliability of his factual information and the fanciful nature of many of the anecdotes
in his narrative.14 In actuality, however, when dealing with Neapolitan Baroque artists,
and in particular with painters of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, De Dominici
provided such a wealth of useful and accurate information that he must be considered
among the finest regional biographers of the entire Baroque era. The question of factual
accuracy, however, is only marginally related to the problem of De Dominici's inherent
bias in favor of the style and working procedures of Francesco Solimena. Only on rare
12

3

Paolo De Matteis,Hercules at the Crossroads. 1711. Leeds, Temple Newsome House.
13

occasions did he actually falsify the nature of events so as to portray Solimena in a more
favorable light.15 His bias operated instead in a more subtle and more pervasive fashion,
as a filter through which to interpret the significance of all recent developments in
Neapolitan painting.
De Dominici's Vite, then, must not be taken as an infallible guide to the state
of painting in Naples prior to about 1725. Contemporary attitudes toward various
painters of the late 17th and early 18th centuries can, however, be gauged through a
study of the Gazzetta di Napoli, a series of weekly avvisi published in Naples throughout
the period under consideration.16 Even a partial survey of this material, which rarely has
been given proper attention by art historians, yields a number of interesting observations17 Prior to 1692, the year of his departure for Spain, Luca Giordano was the painter
most frequently cited in the Gazzetta — a confirmation, no doubt, of his preeminent
stature in the artistic community of Naples. Following Giordano' departure, and indeed
throughout the first quarter of the 18th century, one might expect to find abundant
references to the works of Solimena, but this is not the case. Between 1692 and 1725, in
the years for which avvisi have survived, there occur but three short references to
Solimena.18 But while Solimena received remarkably little attention in these years, both
Paolo De Matteis and Giacomo del Po were cited with great frequency. There are
references to the works of De Matteis for San Luigi di Palazzo, Santo Spirito di Palazzo,
San Francesco Saverio (San Ferdinando), San Giovanni de' Fiorentini, the Pieta de'
Turchini and the Certosa di San Martino19 Similarly, del Po is cited for his paintings in
the Rosariello deJle Pigne, San Domenico Maggiore and Santa Caterina a Formello, as
well as for his scenographic designs for various theatrical productions and his contributions to the catafalques erected in Naples for the Emperor Joseph I and for Pope Innocent
XII.20 Other painters, many of whom today are but little known, likewise received
surprisingly ample consideration. Nicola Russo, for example, is mentioned on four
separate occasions between 1693 and 1697, and his paintings for Santo Spirito di Palazzo
are described as .. acclamato universalmente da tutti i virtuosi, ed intendenti."21 In the
accounts of the customary display of paintings along the via Toledo on the occasion of the
Feast of Corpus Domini in 1709 and 1710, the works of Francesco Peresi alone are singled
out for praise.22
Inferences from a statistical survey of the Gazzetta di Napoli must be made
with the understanding that this source is not a wholly accurate guide to the importance
of a given artist, nor even the "noteworthiness" of his paintings. Only certain types of
projects — namely, major works for the churches of Naples — are consistently reported in
the avvisi. Rarely is there a reference to fresco decorations for a palazzo nobile, to easel
paintings commissioned by private patrons, or to the shipment abroad of even a major
work. Also, insofar as citations in the Gazzetta can be taken to indicate the relative
significance of a project, or the popularity or prominence of a given painter, such
evaluations represent the opinion of the particular author or editor of the entry and
cannot necessarily be generalized as statements of attitudes which were widespread
throughout the cultured population of Naples. Even within these limitations, however,
the evidence of the Gazzetta strongly suggests that the artistic climate of the city between
about 1690 and 1725 was far more open and varied than is generally believed. There is no
evidence of Solimena's preeminence in these years.
An examination of the important commissions of this period likewise fails to
support the contention that Solimena was an especially dominant force in Neapolitan
painting in the first quarter of the 18th century. His production was limited primarily to
altarpieces and large frescoes for the city's churches, and to easel paintings usually of
modest size executed on commission from private collectors. In neither of these fields,
however, was his contribution significantly greater than those of Giacomo del Po, Paolo
De Matteis or even Domenico Antonio Vaccaro. With regard to large-scale fresco decorations for Neapolitan palaces, Solimena's role was decidedly secondary. Whether by
14

inclination or by conscious choice, Solimena painted surprisingly few secular decorations. His four projects of this type, in the Palazzo Reale, the Palazzo Sanfelice, and his
private residences in Naples and Barra, were executed only in the years after about 1730,
following the deaths of Giacomo del Po and Paolo De Matteis, the undisputed masters in
this field.23
The term antisolimeneschi has been applied to a number of painters in Naples
in the early 18th century whose styles may have differed from that of Solimena. Difference, however, does not necessarily imply opposition, and as Solimena was not perceived
by his contemporaries as caposcuola until at least 1725 there is little likelihood that in
the opening decades of the century his classicizing, even "academic" style would have had
so great a force as to spawn a reformatory fronda antisolimenesca. At the present stage in
the development of Neapolitan Baroque studies the desire to simplify and categorize
must be held in check. Only when the polar schema is abandoned and Solimena's role is
seen in its proper perspective can a correct evaluation of the period and the individual
styles of its painters be made.

FOOTNOTES
'The content of this article, based in part upon research for my doctoral dissertation
The Paintings of Giacomo del Po, (University of Kansas, 1978), was presented in
somewhat different form in a paper read at the national meeting of the American
Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, held in Chicago in April, 1978.
2This interpretation can still be found, however, in surveys of the period by British and
American scholars, who have shown a tenacious resistance to recent developments in
the study of Neapolitan Baroque painting. Rudolf Wittkower, for example, in his Art
and Architecture in Italy, 1600 to 1750, (Baltimore and Harmondsworth, 1973),
p. 306, found room in the text only for Solimena,"... who headed the Neapolitan school
unchallenged during the first half of the 18th Century," and relegated to a footnote his
brief treatment of four other painters (including the Fleming Borremans) who were
active in Naples during these years.
3Among the important general histories of Neapolitan painting in this period are
F. Bologna, "Le Arti figurative," in F. Bologna, G. Doria and E. Pannain, Settecento
napoletano, (Naples, 1962), pp. 51-96; O. Ferrari, "Le Arti figurative," in Storia di
Napoli, VI, (Naples, 1970), pp. 1221-1336; and N. Spinosa, "La Pittura napoletana da
Carlo a Ferdinando IV di Borbone," in Storia di Napoli, VIII, (Naples, 1971),
pp. 453-547. Relevant studies of individual artists are cited in the notes below.
4C. Lorenzetti, "La Pittura napoletana del secolo XVIII," in La Mostra della pittura
napoletana dei secoli XVII, XVIII, XIX, (Naples, 1938), pp. 145-203.
5Lorenzetti, "Pittura napoletana," p. 156.
6F. Bologna and R. Causa, Sculture lignee nella Campagna, (Naples, 1950),
pp. 191-92.
7N. Spinosa, "Pittori napoletani del secondo Settecento: Jacopo Cestaro," Napoli
nobilissima, 3rd series, IX, 1970, 74. In a recent private communication, Prof. Spinosa
has indicated to me that he no longer holds this view.
8Due in part to the peculiar circumstances of the commission; see B. Croce, "Shaftesbury
in Italia," in his Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia, (Bari, 1943), Vol. I, pp. 274-311.
9Both painters are placed among the so-called antisolimeneschi in R. Mormone,
"Domenico Antonio Vaccaro architetto, IV: la chiesa di S. Michele a Piazza Dante,"
Napoli nobilissima, 3rd series, IV, (1964-65), 107. Though Vaccaro remains classified
among the opponents of Solimena, an attempt to reassess the position of Malinconico
was made in V. De Martini, "Un Episodio giordanesco a Bergamo," Arte cristiana,
LXVI, (1978), 51-58.
,0P. A. Orlandi, Abecedariopittorico ... coretto e notabilmente di nuove notizie accresciuto,
(Naples, 1733). The first Neapolitan edition had appeared two years earlier.
nDott.ssa Vega De Martini, of the Soprintendenza alle Gallerie di Napoli, has informed
me of her discovery that Nicola Malinconico, traditionally thought to have died in 1721,
continued to work as late as 1728.
15

12B.

De Dominici, Vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti napoletani, (Naples, 1742-43).
of De Dominici's paintings has been identified, and little can be said with
certainty about his career as a painter. Nonetheless, his adulation of Solimena strongly
suggests a pupil-teacher relationship.
14This has been the case since the biting condemnation of De Dominici in B. Croce,
"II Falsario," Napoli nobilissima, I, (1892), pp. 122-26 and 140-44.
15 As with the commission for the spandrel paintings in the nave arcade of SS. Apostoli in
Naples, for which see B. De Dominici, Vite, III, 498. The true nature of Solimena's
intervention, after the Theatine priests had found del Po's work unsatisfactory, can be
gauged through documents published in F. Strazzullo, "Documenti per la storia della
chiesa dei SS. Apostoli," Archivio storicoper leprovince napoletane, XXXVI, (1956), p.
256.
16The early history of the Gazzetta, which has yet to be fully explored, is touched upon in
N. Cortese, Cultura e politica a Napoli dal Cinque al Settecento, (Naples, 1965),
pp. 161-84.
17The only surviving copies of the Gazzetta are preserved in the libraries of Naples. Key
extracts will be made widely available in my "Notices on Painting from the Gazzetta di
Napoli," Antologia di Belli-Arti, at press.
lsGazzetta di Napoli, 11 December 1696, 21 March 1713 and 2 June 1716.
19Gazzetta di Napoli, 7 April 1693, 9 December 1693, 13 July 1695, 25 June 1697,
19 January 1700, 16 November 1700, 6 May 1710, 2 August 1712, 4 April 1713,
18 August 1716 and 8 June 1717.
20Gazzetta di Napoli, 19 May 1693, 8 June 1697, 5 October 1700, 12 May 1711,
8 March 1712, 25 December 1714, 31 August 1717, 2 December 1721,
27 January 1722 and 1 September 1722.
2lGazzetta di Napoli, 22 September 1693, 5 July 1693, 31 July 1696 and 30 April 1697.
22Gazzetta di Napoli, 11 June 1709 and 1 July 1710.
23For the frescoes by Solimena, all lost, see F. Bologna, Francesco Solimena, (Naples,
1957), pp. 284-87.
13None

16

MID-FOURTEENTH
CENTURY PAINTING
IN SUCHOU:
SOME LESSER MASTERS *
Claudia Brown

Since the sixteenth century, historians of Chinese painting have viewed the
later decades of the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) as a period dominated by the Four Great
Masters: Huang Kung-wang, Wu Chen, Ni Tsan and Wang Meng. Modern art-historical
studies published in the West have maintained, and even strengthened, this critical
concept by assuming a more-or-less independent development of the four distinctly
individual styles of the Great Masters in the midst of a cluster of imitative and derivative
styles of the "Lesser Masters" — a group whose membership varies but generally includes among others Chao Yuan, Ch'en Ju-yen, and Hsu Pen.1 A number of recent
publications have treated the period in terms of a broader period style or series of styles,
often taking into account social and geographical considerations as well,2 but the nature
of the artistic contribution of the Lesser Masters remains obscure. Too often they are
portrayed one-dimensionally, as pale reflections of their bright and talented contemporaries who were immortalized in the enduring notion of the Four Great Masters of the
Yuan dynasty.3 An objective look at a selection of paintings by the Lesser Masters of
Suchou active under the regime of Chang Shih-ch'eng (1356-1367) and in the decade
immediately following the establishment of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) forces a
re-evaluation of these long neglected painters.
Two of the Great Masters, Huang Kung-wang and Wu Chen, died in 1354 —
two years before Chang Shih-ch'eng took over the city of Suchou. The other two, Ni Tsan
and Wang Meng, were active in and around Suchou well into the 1370's. Located in the
T h i s article is a revision of a paper read at the October 1978 meeting of the Western
Conference of the Association for Asian Studies held at the University of Arizona,
Tucson. The material presented here is drawn from research for my dissertation now in
progress under the supervision of Prof. Chu-tsing Li, for whose continuing guidance and
support I am grateful.
17

1
Chao Yuan, Grass Pavilion at Ho-hsi.
Shanghai Museum.

18

u it- ^

IS

"A

1

§j|| B

•

.v-^'HW'

2
Ch'en Ju-yen, Song o/* the Wanderer. Collection of the National Palace Museum,
Taiwan, Republic of China.

19

middle of the Yangtze delta and long known for its wealth and scholarship and its literary
and artistic traditions, Suchou had become by late Yuan the leading cultural center in
China.4 Economic reasons account in large part for this ascendancy — Suchou had become a wealthy commercial center for the agricultural products of the rich delta land —
but political developments too were a major factor. By the mid-fourteenth century, the
Mongol government had begun to disintegrate in the hands of leaders far less competent
than Kubilai Khan, the founder of Mongol rule in China during the thirteenth century.
Rebellions had sprung up in the south and the east. Among the more successful rebel
leaders was Chang Shih-ch'eng, a former salt smuggler, who gained control of the city of
Suchou and, in 1356, made it his capital. Well-disposed toward the city's intellectuals,
Chang invited many scholar-painters to serve in his government. When in 1367 he was
forced to surrender to Chu Yuan-chang, the barely literate monk who would found the
Ming dynasty in 1368, Suchou lost its favored status. Suspicious of the wealthy citizenry
of Suchou, Chu seized every opportunity to persecute its intellectuals. Of the many
Suchou scholars who dutifully accepted official positions under the new Ming government, nearly all came eventually to tragic ends at the hands of the new Emperor.
From this politically turbulent period, four talented painters — Huang, Wu,
Ni and Wang — were singled out by later critics as the Four Great Masters of the Yuan.5
The concept of the Four Masters was elaborated gradually during the course of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and reflects the tendency in traditional Chinese
art-historical criticism to codify historical phenomena in terms of simple numerical
patterns. But the concept is by no means universal in Ming criticism. In a well-known
poem on the history of painting, Tu Ch'iung (1396-1474), an older contemporary and
friend of Shen Chou, clearly ranks Chao Yuan as the equal of Wang Meng.6 Ho Liangchiin (1506-73), in his Ssu-yu-chai hua lun, used the term "Four Great Masters" in what
is now standard usage. In that passage, however, a second list follows his enumeration of
the Four Great Masters; here Ch'en Ju-yen, Chao Yuan, Ma Wan, Lu Kuang and Hsu Pen
are described as painters whose expression is "also excellent."7 As late as the 1570's,
Wang Shih-chen felt free to substitute Chao Meng-fu for Ni Tsan in his designation of
"Four Great Masters of the Yuan." Ni he put into another category — the i or "untrammeled" class — along with Kao K'o-kung and Fang Ts'ung-i.8 In the writings of Tung
Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636), this casual grouping of four outstanding painters assumed a
more formal quality, and the notion of "Four Great Masters of the Yuan" became a key
element in his theory of the Northern and Southern schools of painting.9 Ku Fu, writing
half a century after Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, seems nonetheless free of Tung's prejudices. Ku's
Fing-sheng chuang kuan (preface dated 1692) draws no such clear distinctions between
these four painters and their contemporaries. The Lesser Masters Fang Ts'ung-i, Ch'en
Ju-yen and Ma Wan, barely mentioned by Tung, here receive elaborate praise alongside
their more famous colleagues.10
Clearly the Four Masters were the great painters of their day. Yet the
emphasis on their accomplishments has unduly obscured the contributions of the many
other artists of Suchou in the late Yuan whose stylistic experiments paralleled those of
the better-known painters. The reputations of these Lesser Masters, nearly all of whom
died during the reign of Chu Yuan-chang, declined considerably in the first century of the
Ming dynasty and did not fully revive after Suchou regained its former status at the end
of the fifteenth century. The Wu School, which arose in this newly flourishing Suchou,
has been considered a re-establishment of the Yuan tradition of literati painting; indeed,
the leading painters of the Wu School, Shen Chou and Wen Cheng-ming, have been seen
as the direct stylistic heirs of the Four Great Masters. The nature of this inheritance,
however, and the role played by the Lesser Masters in the transmission of the Yuan
tradition awaits explanation.
Contemporary records of Suchou painters in the 1350's are filled with accounts of the activities of the Lesser Masters, many of whom frequented the villa of the
20

3

Ch'en Ju-yen, Woodcutter of Mount Lo-fou. Mr. and Mrs. A. Dean Perry Collection.

21

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22

wealthy gentleman-scholar Ku Ying (properly Ku A-ying or Ku Te-hui). Ku's literary
gatherings, poetry contests, and outings to scenic spots around Suchou included some
participants known specifically for their painting rather than for their poetry or calligraphy. Such less-known painters as Chao Yuan and Ch'en Ju-yen were often included. In
1351, for example, the young painter Ch'en Ju-yen — barely twenty-years-old at the
time — accompanied Ku and two poets to Tiger Hill. Ch'en painted a picture for each of
the poems composed and the poems were then inscribed on the paintings.11
These painters were often called upon to make pictorial records of the country
estates of local gentlemen-scholars. Chao Yiian's hanging scroll, Grass Pavilion atHo-hsi
(fig. I),12 depicts Ku's retreat and bears Ku's inscription of 1363. Ch'en Ju-yen too
received such commissions. An inscription of 1359 by Ni Tsan on Ch'en's Painting of
Ching-hsi, depicting a famous spot near Suchou, records that Ch'en had been specifically
engaged to paint the family estate of Wang Yun-t'ung.13 The delight of recognizing
familiar scenes which lies behind so many of these paintings14 belies the commonly
accepted platitudes about the Yuan scholar-painter's lack of concern for subject matter in
general and for nature as a specific source of inspiration. Sketchy and suggestive as they
may be, these paintings reflect an interest in realistic subjects too often overlooked in
current scholarship.15 Perhaps the most famous example of this genre is the painting of
The Lion Grove (Shih-tzu-lin) in Suchou. Ni Tsan's inscription of 1373 implies he had
discussed the conception of the work with Chao Yuan, but the passage does not clearly
indicate which of the two artists had executed the painting. Wu Ch'i-chen, who saw the
scroll in 1652, listed it as a cooperative work but argued that the painting itself was by
Chao Yuan alone.16 Ku Fu, writing in the late seventeenth century, recorded the work as
a painting by Chao Yuan with an inscription by Ni Tsan17 Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, however,
praised both the inscription and the painting as evidence of Ni's great talent and
creativity.18 In the 1950's, Siren, relying heavily on Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, not only gave the
painting to Ni Tsan but considered it a masterpiece of his later years19 Recent publications20 have revived the link to Chao Yuan, treating the work as a collaborative effort,
but this has had the curious effect of diminishing the importance of the painting rather
than increasing the status of the artist Chao Yuan. The very confusion over the authorship of the scroll suggests a need to re-examine the styles and inter-relationships of late
Yuan painters.
Examples of collaboration between the Great Masters Ni Tsan or Wang Meng
and various Lesser Masters are plentiful. One such effort resulted in The Song of the
Wanderer (dated 1365) in the National Palace Museum (fig. 2). Here Ni Tsan inscribed a
poem by Meng Chiao (751-814), and credited Ch'en Ju-yen with the painting, himself
with the calligraphy. Mistakenly identified as a dull and didactic Confucian parable21
the theme in fact is Meng Chiao's mournful ode to motherly love:
Thread in the hands of a doting mother:
Clothes on the body of a journeying son.
Upon his leaving, she adds one stitch after another,
Lest haply he may not return so soon.
Ah! How could the heart of an inch-long grass
Requite a whole Spring's infinite love and grace?22

In the troubled times of the 1360's, when Chang Shih-ch'eng's regime had become
increasingly corrupt, such a note of regret may have carried an allusion to the self-doubt
of scholars like Ch'en who had agreed to serve the rebel government.
In spite of its turmoil and uncertainty, the mid-1360's saw the development of
a new compositional formula in the work of Suchou painters. Professors Chu-tsing Li and
James Cahill independently have suggested that the landscapes by Wang Meng which
can be dated within this decade are characterized by high mountains built up in densely
packed masses — echoing the monumental mountain compositions of Northern Sung,
23

but described through repetition of long, dry texture strokes.23 The interior drawing often
follows the contours of forms; monotony is relieved by dark wet dots of vegetation. These
authors have also cited related paintings by minor masters including Fang Ts'ung-i's
Divine Mountains and Luminous Woods (1365, National Palace Museum, Taipei);24
Ch'en Ju-yen's Woodcutter of Mount Lo-fou (1366, Perry Collection, Cleveland; fig. 3);
Hsu Pen's Streams and Mountains (1372, Perry Collection; fig. 4); and Chao Yiian's
Farewell by a Stream on a Clear Day (not dated, Metropolitan Museum, New York; fig. 5).
Forming a group which also includes Dwelling in the Ch'ing-pien Mountains (1366,
Shanghai Museum)25 — Wang Meng's acclaimed masterpiece in this genre — these
paintings show a striking homogeneity of composition but an equally striking diversity
of brushwork and expressive effect.
After the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368, painting in the Suchou circle,
though less fully documented, may be even richer in complex artistic inter-relationships.
During these years Ni Tsan reached his mature style in such works as the Jung-hsi
Studio of 1372 (National Palace Museum, Taipei).26 A painting now in Chicago called The
Hermitage (fig. 6), signed by Ch'en Ju-yen and inscribed by Ni Tsan in 1371, though not
as yet firmly authenticated, displays a dry, sparse brushwork which suggests that the
Lesser Masters shared in the creation of the manner which later became associated
exclusively with Ni Tsan. That Ni did not in fact dominate or lead the Suchou painters
during this period has been remarked upon in recent publications27 and yet no serious
attempt has been made to interpret Ni's work in light of that of his less famous friends.
Though the biographies of Ni Tsan and Wang Meng are rather well-known,
our understanding of their work has been clouded by the vast number of paintings now
attributed to them. Since their fame has remained unbroken since the fifteenth century,
innumerable copies — ranging from exacting reproductions to free interpretations —
have been made of their works. Such copies have swelled the number of attributions to
unwieldy proportions. In this regard, the more easily authenticated works by the Lesser
Masters can assist in the process of reconstructing the corpus of paintings of these two
men.
The study of Wang Meng's late work is made even more difficult by the fact
that none of the present attributions is dated between 1370 and 1383. Forest Dwelling at
Chii-ch'u28 often proposed as a late work, is a colored landscape in an archaistic manner.
Wang's dynamic texture strokes which derive from the hemp-fiber manner of Tung Yuan
and Chii-jan are not obscured by the autumn colors of the leaves, but the stylized pattern
of the water, the two-dimensional arrangement of the trees and the screen of rocks
stretching into the corners of the composition and allowing only isolated pockets of space
suggest archaizing tendencies as strong as those of the so-called "blue-and-green" manner. Some have doubted the authenticity of the painting because of its strong color and
unusual composition, but comparison with a late work by Ch'en Ju-yen (d. 1371), Land of
the Immortals (fig. 7), provides evidence for accepting it. A landscape in the blue-andgreen mode, this short handscroll in the Perry Collection is well-documented by early
catalogue descriptions. In depicting the Taoist paradise as a birthday gift for his friend
P'an Yuan-ming (son-in-law of Chang Shih-ch'eng), Ch'en chose to use an archaistic
composition based ultimately on landscapes of the Six Dynasties and T'ang periods. As in
the Chii-ch'ii scroll, the bright color is combined with soft brushstrokes which model the
mountains in the Tung-Chii manner; here, however, the broad washes of flat color soften
the effect of the brushwork. The most compelling similarity between the two paintings
lies in the structure of the mountains which form an impenetrable mass — a mass fully
contained in Ch'en's composition but boldly extending beyond the frame of Wang's. The
inscription by Ni Tsan, dated 1371, not only identifies the immediate source — the
paintings of Chao Meng-fu — for this colored manner, but also confirms that the colored
landscape was a genre acceptable to the tastes of the fourteenth century Suchou literati29
24

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Ch'en Ju-yen, Hermitage. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
25

7

Ch'en Ju-yen, Land of Immortals. Mr. and Mrs. A. Dean Perry Collection.

Wang Meng and Ch'en Ju-yen may well have exchanged ideas during the first
four years of the Ming. Both accepted official positions under the first Ming emperor, and
both were sent to Shantung to serve in the provincial administration. Literary records
indicate that the two visited several times and once even collaborated in finishing one of
Wang Meng's colored landscapes.30 It appears that Wang Meng and Ch'en Ju-yen had
become interested in the colored landscape in the years following Chu Yuan-chang's
conquest of the Suchou area in 1367. The blue-and-green manner had enjoyed great
popularity among the frustrated literati painters at the beginning of the Yuan. Its
reappearance in the closing years of the dynasty might once again be related to the
disappointment and frustration of the scholar-painters of the South. Although they may
have looked forward to the return of government to Chinese hands, under the tyrannical
reign of Chu Yuan-chang they had to fear for their very lives.
Chu's prejudice against the Suchou literati who had supported Chang Shihch'eng led to reprisals which virtually destroyed the Suchou school. Chao Yuan and
Ch'en Ju-yen were executed in the 1370's; Wang Meng and Hsu Pen died in prison in the
1380's.31 The biographies of the Lesser Masters are not well recorded, but clearly these
were men younger than the Great Masters by as much as a generation. Ch'en and Hsu
were too young to be recorded in Hsia Wen-yen's treatise of 1365, the T'u-huipao chien.
Their youth may account for their frequent inclusion in lists of Ming painters, despite the
fact that they lived only a few years into the Ming. Indeed a double standard seems to
have been at work: Wang Meng who lived until 1385, fully seventeen years into Ming, is
invariably treated as a Yuan painter while Ch'en Ju-yen, who died within four years
after the Ming conquest is listed in several sources as a Ming painter32 These inconsis26

tencies have further contributed to the obscurity of the Lesser Masters.
In spite of their short lives — Ch'en was only forty when he died, Hsu only
forty-five — the Lesser Masters undoubtedly left behind a number of works which later
influenced the course of painting in Suchou.33 Shen Chou's early work, often termed
eclectic, might be better understood as the result of a broad knowledge of late Yuan
paintings by major and minor artists. His famous Lofty Mount Lu of 1467 (National
Palace Museum, Taipei) was painted for Ch'en K'uan, the grandson of Ch'en Ju-yen, as a
birthday gift. Shen pictures Mt. Lu, the ancestral home of the Ch'en family, in much the
same spirit as Ch'en Ju-yen had painted Ching-hsi. Though the resemblance to Wang
Meng's work is clear, there are striking similarities of structure and composition to Ch'en
Ju-yen's Woodcutter of Mount Lo-fou.
The "Four Masters" concept was most authoritatively stated during the
seventeenth century by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and other members of his circle, for whom it
served in the art-historical theory which established the Northern or Professional School
and the Southern or Scholarly School of painting. Huang, Wu, Ni and Wang became
honored patriarchs in the lineage of the favored Southern School. It is widely recognized

that Tung's preference for the paintings of the Southern School literati has persisted in
the subtle prejudices which have informed modern histories of painting.34 In the case of
late Yuan painting, the arbitrary concept of Four Great Masters similarly continues to
filter our perception of the artistic events. As a result, the Lesser Masters too often are
looked upon as the earliest participants in a long tradition of copying the Four Great
Masters. This approach has severely constrained our understanding of the Great Masters
themselves as well as their less famous contemporaries.
27

FOOTNOTES
^ee, for example, James Cahill, Hills Beyond a River, (New York and Tokyo, 1976).
Chu-tsing Li, "The Development of Painting in Soochow during the Yuan
Dynasty," Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chinese Painting, (Taipei,
1972); and "Stages of Development in Yuan Dynasty Landscape Painting," National
Palace Museum Bulletin, IV/2, 1969, pp. 1-10 and IV/3, 1969, pp. 1-12.
3Note for example Professor Cahill's comment: "The works of the lesser masters who
were active in the late Yuan offer, on the whole, slightly diluted versions of the styles of
the great masters," Cahill, Hills, p. 28.
4For an excellent study of the intellectual climate of Suchou in the late Yuan, see
Frederick Mote, The Poet Kao CKi (1336-1374), (Princeton, 1962).
5In the wake of several publications on the early Yuan painters Chao Meng-fu and
Ch'ien Hsiian, this appellation has been modified to the "Four Great Masters of the
Late Yuan." The paradigm of four dominant figures nevertheless retains its hold for the
later decades of the period. On Ch'ien, see Richard Edwards, "Ch'ien Hsiian and 'Early
Autumn,'"Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, VII, 1953, pp. 71-83; James
Cahill, "Ch'ien Hsiian and his Figure Paintings," Archives, XII, 1958,
pp. 11-24; and Wen Fong, "The Problem of Ch'ien Hsiian," Art Bulletin, XLII, 1960,
pp. 173-89. On Chao, see Chu-tsing Li, The Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua
Mountains, (Ascona, 1965); and "The Freer Sheep and Goat and Chao Meng-fu's Horse
Paintings," Artibus Asiae, XXX, 1968, pp. 279-326.
6The poem is cited in Yii Chien-hua, Chung-kuo hua-lun lei-pien, (Peking, 1957), I,
p. 103; and translated in Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, (Cambridge,
1971), p. 164, and James Cahill, Parting at the Shore, (New York and Tokyo, 1978),
p. 77.
7Ho Liang-chun, Ssu-yu-chai hua-lun (Mei-shu ts'ung shu, III, 3), p. 36. These remarks
on painting were collected from Ssu-yu-chai ts'ung-shuo (preface dated 1569).
8Wang Shih-chen, I-yuan chih-yen fu-lu, in Yen-chou shan-jen ssu-pu kao (Ming-tai
lun-che ts'ung-k'an ed.), XIV, p. 7079. Translated in Siren, The Chinese on the Art of
Painting (reprint of original 1936, Peiping edition), (New York and Hong Kong, 1963),
2See

28

p. 128. See also National Palace Museum, Yuan ssu ta chia ("The Four Great Masters of
the Yuan"), (Taipei, 1975), p. 11 (English text).
9Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, Hua chih, in Yii Chien-hua, Chung-kuo hua-lun lei-pien, II,
p. 720; and Hua yen, in ibid., II, p. 726. For translations, see Bush, The Chinese Literati
on Painting, pp. 167-9; and Siren, The Chinese on the Art of Painting,
pp. 133-6. See also the discussion of the evolution of the Four Masters concept in
National Palace Museum, Yuan ssu ta chia, p. 8 (Chinese text), p. 11 (English text).
10Ku Fu, P'ing-sheng chuang kuan (I-shu shang-chien hsiian-chen ed.), II, chiian
9, 117.
11 David Sensabaugh, "Notes on Ku Te-hui: A Late Yuan Literatus" (unpublished paper
given at the ACLS Research Conference on the Impact of Mongol Domination on
Chinese Civilization, York, Maine, 1976), p. 6; cited with permission of the author.
12Chu-tsing Li has pointed out the close compositional tie between this painting and the
works of Wu Chen and Ni Tsan ("Chao Yuan," inDictionary of Ming Biography, ed. by
L. Carrington Goodrich and Chao-ying Fang, New York, 1976, I, pp. 136-7).
13 According to Ni's inscription, the patron later pointed to the painting and said
nostalgically, "Those are the trees my grandfather planted and the hills my father
roamed." (Translation after Karen Brock and Robert Thorp, in Yuan ssu ta chia, p. 73
English text.) The painting is illustrated in Li, Proceedings, pi. 22.
14 Another painting in this genre is Scenery of I-hsing (dated 1356), by Chou Chih, now in
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (K. Tomita and Tseng Hsien-ch'i, Portfolio of Chinese
Paintings, Vol. II: Yuan to Ch'ing, 1961, pis. 16-18). Chou Chih, another of the Lesser
Masters who served Chang Shih-ch'eng, was highly praised by both contemporary and
later critics. See Chu-tsing Li, "Chou Chih," Dictionary of Ming Biography, I, pp. 266.
15See John Hay's discussion of this problem in his review of Cahill, Hills Beyond a River,
in the Journal of Asian Studies, XXXVII, 1978, p. 351.
,6Wu Ch'i-chen, Shu hua chi (ca. 1677), Shanghai, 1962,290-1. Li refers to this passage in
his biography of Chao Yuan (Dictionary of Ming Biography, I, p. 137) but argues against
this conclusion on stylistic grounds.
29

,7 Ku

Fu, P'ing-sheng chuang kuan, chiian 9, 74.
Ch'i-ch'ang, Hua yen CMei-shu ts'ung-shu, I, 3), p. 52.
,9 0svald Siren, Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, (London, 1958), IV,
p. 84.
20Li, see note 16. Cahill, Hills, p. 129.
21 This little painting has received unfair treatment by western scholars. Siren listed it
under the ambiguous title, "A Scene of Filial Piety" 0Chinese Painting, VII, p. 165).
Cahill mistakenly identified the subject as Mencius and his mother (Hills, p. 154),
specifically the incident in which Mencius, having left his studies to return home, was
silently admonished by his mother who stopped her weaving to demonstrate the
"unproductiveness of inactivity." Cahill goes on to say, "Ch'en Ju-yen represents her
sewing instead of weaving — perhaps the depiction of a loom seemed too taxing for his
limited powers as a draftsman." Such scoffing is of course inappropriate since the
painting has nothing to do with the famous anecdote. Professor Cahill's estimation of
the amateurish quality of Ch'en's painting is, however, undebatable. The tentative
treatment of the horse and cart does contribute to the charm of the work but could never
be termed of professional quality. Likewise Cahill's stylistic analysis is astute: he
suggests as precedents the figure paintings of Li Kung-lin and Ma Ho-chih and cites in
particular the latter's sentimental treatment of historical themes.
,8Tung

"Translation after John C. H. Wu, The Four Seasons of Tang Poetry, (Rutland, Vt. and
Tokyo, 1972), p. 155. Meng Ch'iao's poem, "Song of the Wanderer" (Yu-tzuyin) can be
found in Meng Tung-yeh shih-chi, in Ssu-pu tsung k'an, XL, chiian 1, 9.
23Li, National Palace Museum Bulletin,w. 9-11, and Proceedings, pp. 497-8. Cahill, Hills,
pp. 122-4. Chang Kuang-pin presents the same interpretation in National Palace
Museum, Yuan ssu ta chia, pp. 30-1 (Chinese text), pp. 36-7 (English text).
24Cahill, Hills, pi. 59.
251 bid., pi. 53.
26Ibid., pi. 50.
27Sherman Lee and Wai-kam Ho, Chinese Art Under the Mongols, (Cleveland, 1968), p.
61. See also, Li, Proceedings, p. 499.
28Cahill, Hills, pi. 58.
29Ni's inscription states that Ch'en "succeeded profoundly in capturing the brush ideas of
Chao Meng-fu." (Translation after Lee and Ho, Chinese Art Under the Mongols,
pi. 264.) Moreover the inscription indicates Ni's own admiration for the work of one of
the Lesser Masters. See ibid., p. 60 and pi. 264.
30Cited by Siren, Chinese Painting, IV, pp. 91-2. A relatively early account of the story
which specifies that the painting was in color is given in Ho Liang-chun, Ssu-yu-chai
hua-lun, p. 41.
31 It was surely the loss of so many talented painters and not, as Professor Richard
Barnhart has suggested ("Yao Yen-ching, T'ing-mei, of Wu Hsing," Artibus Asiae,
XXXIX, 1977, p. 23), a cramped narrowness of taste, which brought about the decline of
the Suchou School.
32See for example, Hsu Ch'in, Ming-hua lu (colophon dated 1673; Hua-shih ts'ung-shu
ed.), chiian 2, 19. Following that source, Siren lists Ch'en and Hsu in the Ming dynasty
section of his lists 0Chinese Painting, VII, p. 165 and pp. 193-4).
33Cahill (Parting at the Shore, pp. 57-8 and p. 59) acknowledges the Wu school's debt to the
Lesser Masters of late Yuan dynasty Suchou, but credits those fourteenth century
artists only with setting, a precedent for the eclecticism of fifteenth century painters.
34Barnhart has cited the damaging effects of what he calls an "incestuous historiography"
that has "distorted the complex truths ofYuan art" {Artibus Asiae, 1977, p. 122). A body
of art criticism written largely by Southern scholar-painters has discredited the
painters — many of them Northerners — who sought to maintain professional
standards in painting. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and earlier critics, including Hsia Wen-yen of
fourteenth century Suchou, have contributed significantly to the obscurity of
professional painters of the Yuan (ibid., p. 106 and pp. 122-3).
30

A
RE-EXAMINATION OF
THE
CULT OF DEMETER
AND THE
MEANING OF
THE ELEUSINIAN
MYSTERIES
Sherly Farness
Scholarly research relating to the Eleusinian Mysteries is contradictory,
ambiguous, confusing and, often, questionable. The polarities in approach seem best
exemplified by Mylonas,1 who insists that the Mysteries have remained mysterious, and
Kerenyi,2 who maintains that the themes at Eleusis are basic to the religious experience
of man and are penetrable. On the one hand there is a reasonable amount of exoteric
material, on the other, the hidden means and meaning that is nowhere directly revealed.
The origin and antiquity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, like those of Dionysos
and Orpheus, are not indisputably known. What is known tends to suggest extremely
archaic rituals and beliefs, for the mysteries of Demeter and Kore were celebrated at
Eleusis centuries before it became a Panhellenic religious center. Mircea Eliade states
rather decisively that "the Eleusinian initiation descends directly from an agricultural
ritual centered around the death and resurrection of a divinity controlling the fertility of
the fields."3 On this point there seems to be general agreement, as well as recognition of
the difficulty of tracing the stages by which an agricultural ritual was transformed into a
mystery of regeneration bringing individual salvation. However, to attempt to assign an
origin to the cult of Demeter is to plunge immediately into diverse opinions backed by
what appears to be sound scholarship.
Nilsson, for example, assigns a Minoan origin to Demeter, for the myth does
tell of her journey from Crete to search for her daughter Kore (Persephone), who had been
gathering flowers on the plain of Nysa with the daughters of Oceanus, when she was
carried off by Hades to the Underworld. 5 When Kore disappears, Demeter causes the

earth to become barren, and when she is released for a stipulated period of time each year,
the earth produces abundantly. The idea of a goddess of fertility dying each year "is
un-Greek; moreover, it does not occur in Asia in this form, and must therefore be
considered an original product of Minoan religious genius."6 In the Near East, Sumerian
mythology recounts the rape of the young goddess, Ninlil, and her subsequent descent to
the underworld, but fragmentary cuneiform texts merely hint at possible seasonal
meaning.7
31

A primary authority, however, is George Mylonas, who has worked intensively at the site of the mysteries. Mylonas denies Demeter's Cretan origin. In spite of the
fact that the Homeric Hymn says she was from Crete, he contends that Crete was a
convenient name for the indefinite often used by ancient poets.8 No Cretan objects have
been found at Eleusis in 150 years of excavations.9 Since Egypt has also been suggested as
the country of origin of the Demetrian cult,10 Mylonas is careful to note that no Egyptian
objects have appeared either. So, for Mylonas a Cretan or Egyptian origin is not justifiable. There is no proof, although he does not take account of the fact that those objects
recovered at Eleusis date from relatively late periods. He favors a northern origin for
Demeter, possibly Thrace or Thessaly,11 since they were agricultural societies as opposed
to the Cretan thalassocracy. Personal preferences are, of course, no proof. Neither is it
anywhere suggested that because Crete was a maritime culture it adopted a sea-goddess
as its major deity. All evidence points to the traditional mother-goddess, i.e. an earthgoddess, in Minoan civilization.
As additional proof of Demeter's Minoan origin Nilsson also mentions the
kernos, a ritual object used in Crete and also found at Eleusis.12 The kernos, a clay vessel
with a number of smaller clay cups attached to it, was ceremonially filled with grains,
fruits, oil, wine, etc. and presented as offerings to the deity. Mylonas insists, however,
that the kernos at Eleusis was an independently developed form based on ritual need, just
as the kernos of East Christian worship developed out of particular ritualistic needs,
although the general type existed in Crete.13 This is, of course, quite possible, but
Mylonas' statement does not prove the lack of an equally possible continuing tradition.
Mylonas also points to the goddess' name. "Demeter" is most Greek14 Kerenyi
agrees. "Da was a primitively ancient name for Ga or Gaia. Da-meter or Da-mater was
probably so named in her quality of'Earth-mother'.. ."15 But name changes for deities are
common to most ancient cultures. The etymology of "Demeter" does not serve to prove
that the cult did not originate elsewhere.
For Mylonas an additional reason for the rejection of Crete or Egypt as
originating centers lies in the Eleusinian temple forms.
"The Megaron-temple of Demeter... is of the normal Greek type and has
nothing to do with the shrines of either the Egyptians or the Minoan Cretans.
It is a native form developed locally, belonging to the mainland of Greece.
This fact will invalidate the argument of the Egyptian or Minoan origin of the
cult based upon the square plan of the later telesteria."16
That the form of a Greek building should be characteristically Greek has nothing to do
with the origin of a cult. The most that can be said is that the building form is not based on
Egyptian or Cretan models.
The question of origin is also dealt with by Legge, who points out that in the
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, her trials on earth, as well as those of Kore, occurred partly
in Eleusis and partly in Asia Minor17 Concurring with this viewpoint, too, is Saxl, but his
comments draw Dionysos into the Eleusinian picture, complicating it still further.
"The two mystery gods of Greece were Demeter and Dionysos... Both are
vegetation deities. Both are connected with the underworld and with rebirth.
Derived from widely different origins the two divinities met at Eleusis and
from the classical Greek period onward there was a certain blending of the
mysteries of Eleusis with the cult of Dionysos. The third element in this
amalgam is the Great Mother from Asia Minor, who came to Athens before
the Persian Wars, and was completely assimilated with the Greek Mothergoddess, Demeter."18
That Crete and Mycenae had some cultural interchange cannot be ruled out as the means
by which Demeter was absorbed into the Greek mainland. It must also be acknowledged
32

that Crete had extensive trade relations with Egypt and Asia Minor, which allowed for
the flow of ideas as well as material goods. Nor were the Mycenaeans strangers to Egypt,
having served as mercenaries in the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egyptian soil.
Nevertheless, Mylonas very carefully demolishes all arguments attempting to prove,
from artifacts, ancient texts, etc., that the cult of Demeter existed before Mycenaean
times, or had its roots in cultures removed from the Greek mainland. His empirical
orientation gives a certain weight to his arguments, but considering the ancient and
universal character of the earth-mother, the fragmentary finds, the lack of negative or
positive proof, he may easily be wrong. There remains the uneasy feeling that for
Mylonas proof of a Greek origin seems a necessity. Yet his own admission of uncertainty
is clear when he eloquently, and romantically, speaks of standing amid the ancient ruins
on moonlit evenings hoping that the proof he longs for will appear.19
Quite a different orientation appears in Kerenyi for whom external proof
seems far less important than meaning. When Kerenyi writes of Demeter, the Earthmother, he writes, too, of the Primordial Child, both certainly adhering to the Mysteries
at Eleusis.
"We cannot with any certainty derive it from Crete, nor ascribe it exclusively
to the sphere of old Mediterranean culture. We can, however, assert that in
Crete there existed an older sphere of culture... the spirit of which was more
fundamentally mythological... the mythologem of the Primitive Child is
characteristic not of this recent but of an older mentality."20
Drawing from all sources in an attempt at a collective statement, it seems that Crete,
Mycenae, and Asia contributed to what became a specifically Greek phenomenon.
The second half of the 15th century B.C. is the traditional date for the
introduction of the cult of Demeter, as well as for the first sowing of wheat on the Rarian
Plain at Eleusis.21 This is derived both from indications in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
and from excavations.22 The earliest Temple of Demeter, the one believed mentioned in
the Hymn, was found on the east slope of the citadel of Eleusis in 193123 Sacred places
have a way of remaining sacred and building after building was erected on the same site
even though the terrain was not always the easiest to deal with. Mylonas carefully
examines the results of the excavations, dealing with successive periods and successive
political rules, right up through Roman times until the end of the 5th century A.D. when
the Sanctuary was destroyed, probably by Early Christians.24
Of all the religions of the Greeks, it was the Mysteries of Eleusis that drew the
attention of the entire Hellenic world. Sometime in the autumn of each year messengers
proclaiming the Sacred Truce, to ensure peace for the ceremonies, were sent to all
countries where there might be Athenians. It was under Solon (6th century B.C.) that the
Mysteries formed part of the Athenian sacred rites as provided in his special laws25
although their Panhellenic nature is already indicated by the Proerosia, a festival and
sacrifice held as early as 760 B.C.26 On some autumnal day, then, a great crowd would
gather for a festival that lasted almost two weeks. After the worshippers had congregated
there was the "proclamation of the hierophant that none but those unpolluted by crime
and of intelligible speech, i.e. not barbarians, might take part in the Mysteries."27 Then a
procession of initiates looked at the sacred objects, never specified, that had been brought
from Eleusis under guard and placed in the Eleusinion at the base of the Acropolis. This
was followed by the celebrants going to the harbor of Phalerum to wash themselves and
the animals intended for sacrifice in salt water, believing that the sea washed away their
sins.
"After a time spent in sacrificing and austerities very proper for bringing the
worshippers into a receptive state of mind, there was formed a long procession which paced the Sacred Way, twelve miles long, from Athens to Eleusis,
beguiling the road with hymns and choruses addressed to Iacchos, the infant
33

Dionysos, who was supposed to lead the procession from his Athenian temple,
the Iaccheion, with a pause at the bridge over the Cephisus, where the crowd
exchanged coarse jokes and sarcasms in a manner peculiarly Attic."28
The coarse jokes refer to those told to Demeter by Iambe, a servant of Queen Metaneira,
at whose palace Demeter paused in her search for Kore. Legge continues with a step-bystep detailing of events: the arrival by night at the Telesterion (Hall of Initiations) at
Eleusis, where the sky was light from the many torches, then more sacrifices, a sacred
banquet, and possibly "the mystic cyceon or consecrated drink was partaken of.. ,"29
Surrounding the Hall were temples to Demeter, Hades, and Kore, and after
appropriate sacrifices there, the initiates supposedly viewed a sacred drama, the actors
being the priests of the cult. The priesthood was restricted to two ancient families, the
Eumolpidae and the Kerykes, thus heredity, and Legge, adds, "highly paid."30 There is
some question regarding the "dramatic" presentations. "... a visit to the telesterion of
Eleusis is convincing evidence that a drama, in the scenographic sense of the word could
not have been enacted there."31 Nor were simulated Underworld journeys possible.32
Mylonas believes "that the story was developed in and out of the Telesterion, around the
very landmarks supposed to have been consecrated by the actual experience and presence
of Demeter."33 It is more than a little difficult to envision great crowds of people moving
around the Sanctuary with any semblance of the order that attaches itself to religious
ceremony. It is far more likely that the ritual was a formal one. "... early Greek religion,
at least, is largely a matter of performance, and this was the basis of the Mysteries."34
There were three degrees of initiation at Eleusis: preparation and probation
(katharsis), initiation and communion (muesis), and blessedness and salvation (epopteia). These had their visual and ritual parallels in the history of Dionysos shown at the
Lesser Mysteries; the rape of Kore and Demeter's wanderings at the Greater Mysteries;
and the Epopsy, shown only to second-year initiates, which revealed the sacred marriage
of Zeus and Demeter, and the birth of Iacchos, the new Dionysos. Demeter is the
corn-mother, the grain-producing earth. Her union with Zeus, the sky-god, becomes a
necessity, for without heavenly events, the warmth of sun, the wet of rain, it would do
little good to bear the seed.
But how was this shown when "the archeological findings are decisively
against the supposition of a mystery-theatre, either in the Telesterion or outside it. And
not a single text speaks a word in its favor."35 Could it have been a mystery dance, as
Kerenyi suggests, and the "secret" of Eleusis an injunction against telling how the
mystery was presented? "Dancing formed part of the initiation ceremonies of the ancient
Mysteries, and to such a degree of refinement was it carried that the theologies of certain
sects were said to be more clearly expressed by gesticulations than by... words.. ,"36
Richardson, in examining the Homeric Hymn, also indicates the likelihood of dancing
with torches.37
The Temple of Demeter did not primarily serve to house a cult image as other
Greek temples did.38 However, it did contain a place for sacred objects; more importantly,
services of some sort were held there for large crowds of initiates. Through some ritualistic sequence the stories of Kore, Demeter, and the sacred marriage were unfolded.
"In the Eleusinian mysteries the 'holy marriage,'... and the birth of the child
that succeeded to this, were signs of salvation: Ts not the gloomy descent
there, and the solemn meeting between the hierophant and the priestess, he
alone and she alone? Are not the lamps extinguished? And does not the vast
and countless assembly of the people believe that what they two accomplish
in the darkness means their salvation?' And when the torches were lit once
more the saviour's birth was solemnly announced to the people. Thus sexual
union was... this Power and had the form of a saviour.. ,"39

The symbolism of light and darkness, the birth of a child, and the ear of corn are elements
obtainable from the hymn:*0
The Dionysos born of the sacred marriage was not the god of wine (Thebes) but
Dionysos Zagreus, the hunter (Crete).41 Occasionally Dionysos is referred to as resulting
from the union of Zeus, in the form of a serpent, and his daughter Kore; this from an
Orphic story.42 And Zeus of Eleusis was not the Zeus of Olympos. He was invoked at
Eleusis as Zeus Chthonios (infernal), Zeus Eubuleus (good counsel), Pluton (bringer of
riches), etc., but he was always king of the dead.43 Dionysos, too, was referred to by
Heraclitus of Ephesus as being the same god as Hades, thus also king of the dead. "In this
double capacity, Dionysos was therefore the brother, father, and spouse of his consort
Demeter, of whom he was also the child. He might therefore be considered one of the first
instances known in the history of religions as a god who was, according to the way in
which he was regarded, either father or son."44
Fusion is reflected in the goddesses as well, for they too had this special unity
in which each was the other, each an aspect of one goddess.
"The goddess by whom Zeus begat Persephone was originally his mother
Rhea: Demeter appears as a third party interposed between mother and
daughter, both of whom appeared earlier in Greece than she did. She is
described as Rhea's alter ego, yet she is also identified with Persephone: Zeus
begat Dionysos... by Demeter or by Persephone."45
The iconographic symbols that accrue to Demeter-Kore seem entirely appropriate to a goddess of fertility and resurrection. As a figure for nourishment, votive
statuettes of pigs, or reliefs showing initiates holding pigs, have been found at Eleusis.
The pig was sacred to Demeter (as well as to Isis)46 and appears mythologically in the
form of Eubuleus and his herd of swine disappearing into the earth with Kore after
witnessing her rape. The sow is apt to have a large litter, and since the piglets all manage
to be suckled simultaneously it is not surprising that it became a symbol of sustenance.
Kerenyi calls the pig the "uterine animal" of the earthf7 The sow was each initiate's
sacrificial offering at the beginning of the autumn festival, and at that time, too, the
putrified remains of the preceding year's pigs were retrieved, mixed with corn and placed
on the altar in commemoration of Eubuleus and to promote good crops.48
Nor is it surprising to find heads of wheat associated with the Goddess (es), and
the pelanos, a sacred cake of wheat and barley was offered as sacrifice in the Greater
Mysteries49 Demeter is the Corn-goddess and the Mother-goddess: grain and motherhood
in symbolic union. Within the framework of the myth Demophon (Demophoon), Queen
Metaneira's son, is treated as grain, placed in the fire in order to make him immortal50
"Does the goddess, perhaps overstep the bounds of the humanly possible by
reason of her sovereignty in that other domain of hers, which includes the
fate of the grain? And not only by reason of her power, but because of her
form? It would seem so, when we consider that the Demetrian fruit is perfected for human nourishment in the fire. Whether it is parched or baked as
bread, death by fire is the fate of the grain."51
Another fundamental symbol of the Mysteries of Eleusis is the torch. Whether
it is "one torch, two torches held by the same goddess, three torches in a row, or the

crossed torch with four lights, all these occur as attributes of both Demeter and Persephone."52 Are the torches, as light, symbols of knowledge? Is the flaming torch the Divine
Child, the light of the world? Pindar, in the opening passage of his work on reincarnation
and life after death, equates the child with light and knowledge53 A flame is never still, it
connotes time and movement, it consumes. If the lighted torch is associated with the
Divine Child, there must have been an automatic association with the future54 The
tendency is to see the "child's" transformation into youth and adult, while carrying
35

within him qualities of innocence and perfection. In this sense the child image is a
hope image. Dionysos, as the fruit of the sacred marriage, becomes the male counterpart
of Kore.
The Eleusinian mysteries, like other Greek mysteries, were based on divine
myth, and the myth of Demeter is, in effect, the unfolding of her nature. The sequence of
rites at Eleusis, then, symbolically reactualized the ancient mythological events: in this
way the mystes were led by stages into the presence of the divine. By participating in
ritual, i.e. searching for Kore, rejoicing when found, etc., time was annihilated and the
events occurred there and then.55 It was a move toward mythological time, sacred time. "It
is by virtue of the nearness of the Goddesses, and finally of their presence, that the
initiate will have the unforgettable experience of initiation."56 It is subjective experience
plus the sacramental apts that combine to bring about the change. The initiate already
knew the myth and was probably not taught any secret doctrine, although the form which
the myth took in the mysteries themselves must have differed considerably from their
presentation in literature57 It was Clement of Alexandria who wrote of the sacred
formula: "I fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took out of the chest, having done the act I put
again into the basket, and from the basket into the chest."58
Initiation is a transition, a rite of passage, and indicates a new beginning, and
thus a rebirth. "... those adopted by the deity in the mysteries were looked upon as
deuteropotmoi, 'those to whom a second destiny was given'."59 Considering the awe and
terror inspired by the great deities of the Underworld who controlled men's lives on earth
and after death, what would prompt the mystes to submit voluntarily to initiation,
involving as it did the dread oath of secrecy, which injunction even the Homeric Hymn
preserves? Later writers, i.e. Sophocles and Pindar, told of the unhappy fate of sinners
and the uninitiated, for the underworld was seen as a place of physical decay, a hell of
mud and slime. Initiation brought the hope or the assurance of an ineffable state of
existence, if not now, at least in the future when the mysterious transition from life into
death took place. "Everywhere there is this spiritual regeneration, a pallingensis, which
found its expression in the radical change in the mystes's existential status."61 The
constituent elements necessary for this to occur were the goddess' summons, the
neophyte's own readiness, and the performance of rituals. The initiated, men and women
alike, regarded themselves as being one with the goddess, and to experience the Demetrian passion to the full was to pass through events that led to the ultimate understanding of what it meant to suffer mortality and to be born again.

FOOTNOTES
George E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, (Princeton, N.J., 1961).
(Karoly) Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, (London and New York, 1951).
3Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, (New York, 1958), p. 41.
4Martin P. Nilsson, Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Religion,
C.W.K. Gleerup, Lund, 1950, p. 528.
5The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ed. by N.J. Richardson, (Oxford, 1974), p. 75.
6Nilsson, op. cit., p. 528.
7Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, (Garden City, N.Y., 1959),
pp. 84-88.
8Mylonas, op. cit., p. 18.
9Ibid., p. 15.
10P. Foucart, Les Mysteres d'Eleusis, (Paris, 1914), pp. 20-40.
nIbid., p. 19.
12Nilsson, op. cit., pp. 450-453.
13Mylonas, op. cit., p. 18.
l4Ibid., p. 19.
15Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 184.
2Carl

36

16Mylonas,
17Francis

op. cit., p. 49. The "Telesterion" is the Hall of Initiation.
Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, (New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1964), p.

38.
Saxl, Lectures, (London, 1957), p. 27.
19Mylonas, op. cit., p. 281.
20C.G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, (New York, 1963),
p. 65.
21Mylonas, op. cit., p. 14.
22Richardson, op. cit., pp. 4 & 13. The Hymn dates from the 7th-6th century, B.C. and
reflects a relatively late stage in the development of the cult. Richardson confirms that
for the early stages, archeology, other versions of the Hymn, and the testimony of later
writers must be consulted.
23Mylonas, op. cit., p. 34.
24S. Angus, The Mystery-Religions and Christianity, (New York, 1925), p. vii. Angus more
specifically states that the Sanctuary was destroyed by the fanatic monks in the train of
Alaric in 396 A.D.
25Mylonas, op. cit., p. 63.
26Ibid., p. 7.
27Legge, op. cit., p. 38.
2SIbid., p. 39. Iacchos was identical with Dionysos at least as early as the time of
Sophocles.
29Ibid. Kykeon was a mixture of barley flour, water, and mint, the drink offered to
Demeter by Queen Metaneira, to refresh her after his unsuccessful and exhausting
search for Kore.
™Ibid.
31 Angus, op. cit., p. 58.
32F. Noack,Eleusis, die baugeschichtlicheEntwicklung desHeiligturns, (Berlin, 1927), p.
236ff.
33Mylonas, op. cit., p. 263.
34Richardson, op. cit., p. 29.
35Jung and Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 141.
36Harold Bayley, The Last Language of Symbolism, New York, 1951, p. 196.
37Richardson, op. cit., p. 25.
38Mylonas, op. cit., p. 79.
39C. Van der Leeuw, Religion in Manifestation and Essence, (New York, 1963), p. 369, and
Richardson, op. cit., pp. 26-27.
^Richardson, op. cit., p. 26.
41Legge, op. cit., pp. 46-47.
42Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 252.
43Legge, op. cit., p. 47.
44Ibid.
45Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 252.
^Bayley, op. cit., p. 90.
47Jung and Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 119.
48E.O. James, The Ancient Gods, (New York, 1960), p. 161.
49Mylonas, op. cit., p. 219.
50Jung and Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 116.
511bid.
52Ibid., p. 118.
53Richardson, op. cit., p. 318.
54Jung and Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 110.
55Richardson, op. cit., p. 315. The present tense is used in the closing lines of the hymn.
56Eliade, op. cit., p. 110.
57Richardson, op. cit., p. 306.
58Eliade, op. cit., p. 110.
59Van der Leeuw, op. cit., p. 529.
60Richardson, op. cit., pp. 310-315.
61 Jung and Kerenyi, op. cit., p. 138.
18F.

37

ARIZONA

PORTFOLIO
40
Wooden Cross, Mexico

44
Le Petit Tablier

48

La Reunion
Des Plus Celebres
Monuments Antiques
De La France

39

WOODEN CROSS,
MEXICO
Mildred Monteverde
In 1977 the University Art Collection at Arizona State University received
from Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Adler a gift that included a small decorated wooden cross.
The cross is known to be Mexican, a type often considered "folk art," and probably was
intended for use in a private devotional context. It would have been located in a simple
domestic shrine, much in the way it is now displayed in the Matthews Center gallery.
No details more specifically indicating the Mexican origins of the cross have
been documented.1 The materials and construction, wood base and raised plaster decorations painted with hardware-store enamel, give little clue to provenience. And although
a florid signature appears on the back of the cross in the green paint of the decoration
probably identifying the artisan-maker, no reference to location of manufacture is
evident. Perhaps an iconographic study will reveal information about origins of the cross
not otherwise apparent.
Most of the brightly painted figures scattered across the front of the cross are
familiar symbols of the Passion of Christ.2 There is the arma cristi, the lance, sponge,
ladder and INRI referring to the crucifixion. The coat relates to the Roman soldiers
gambling at the foot of the cross for the robe of Christ. The pillar refers to the flagellation,
the cock to Peter's denial and the bag of coins to the betrayal of Judas. The sun and moon
are ancient crucifixion symbols indicating the sorrow of all creation at the death of
Christ; usually they are shown together, on this cross only the moon appears.
Other figures, a chalice with wafer, the portrait of Christ and a bleeding
heart, either are not symbols of the passion or are modifications of passion symbolism.
The chalice or eucharistic vessel with the wafer is not strictly a passion symbol. But it
does occur with passion symbolism in sixteenth century paintings of The Mass of St.
Gregory in at least two conventual buildings in central Mexico.3 The Mass of St. Gregory
was a favorite theme of early Franciscans during the conversion of Mexico.4 It was this
scene that provided the imagery for large stone crosses carved by Indians under the
direction of missionizing friars for sixteenth century mission churches.5
40

Wooden Cross, Mexico. University Art Collection, Arizona State University. Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Adler, I6V2 x IOV2 inches, paint on plaster and wood.
41

The chalice with wafer is the first indication of sources for the wood cross in
the Matthews Center gallery. The occurrence of the chalice with wafer and the same
other symbols found first in the paintings of the Mass of St. Gregory, then on the early
decorated stone crosses and finally on the folk cross suggests that sixteenth century
images are prototypes for the modern wood cross.
The face of Christ that appears at the juncture of the arms and shaft of the
wood cross is a modification of passion symbolism. This representation of Christ with
crown of thorns is taken from the sudarium or Veronica veil. The sudarium is a passion
symbol relating to the mystic transference of the image of Christ's face to the veil with
which Veronica wiped the brow of Christ on the way to Golgotha. But on the wood cross
the veil is not shown and instead the face of Christ projects from the crossing. Not
surprisingly, this is the important image, having considerably more realistic definition
than the other figures. The three-dimensional head in its location between the arms
anthropomorphizes the cross.
It is this unique modification of passion symbolism that leads to specific
sources for the wood cross. There is a particular type of large stone sixteenth century
cross carved for Augustinian mission churches which has the portrait of Christ from the
Veronica veil at the crossing.6
The figure remaining to be considered on the wood cross indicates further
Augustinian connections. It is the only image that bears no relationship to the Passion of
Christ: the bleeding heart, symbol of the Augustinian order.
The location of the heart on the shaft of the cross intensifies the impression of
the qross as a living 'body.' This effect was clearly intended on the early Augustinian
crosses, and although the image of the bleeding heart was never shown on the stone
crosses, sixteenth century carvers used other devices to suggest a 'crucified' cross. They
pierced the arms and shaft with nails or showed copiously bleeding wounds.
These stone crosses are found in greatest numbers in the Indian communities
of Augustinian missionizing around and in Mexico City. Some remain in their original
location in front of the mission churches, some have been moved to cemeteries, town
plazas or to the entrance of towns. Highly visible, they have been seen beribboned and
strewn with flowers, featured as a kind of shrine when used as a part of religious
processionals.7
A favored religious image is a likely source for folk art and given the close
resemblance between the wood and stone crosses it is probable that the contemporary
wood cross was modeled directly after the sixteenth century crosses. Thus it is likely the
wood cross was made in the area where the stone crosses are located, that is, in the
vicinity of Mexico City.
While establishing the general provenance of the cross may be of some small
use to scholars attempting to clarify the Mexican popular art picture, the particular
value of this study is in validating the link between sixteenth century painting and cross
iconography. There has been disagreement as to sources for the stone crosses. This
modest wood Cross provides, through its unique modification of passion symbolism,
additional evidence that the symbolic system of representation on the stone crosses was
derived from sixteenth century wall paintings of The Mass of St. Gregory and not from
wood crosses brought into Mexico by Europeans.

42

FOOTNOTES
'Popular art is produced in many areas of Mexico; often the place of production is
uncertain.
2A pattern of painted florals behind the raised figures could be remnants of
Pre-Columbian symbolism (where flowers symbolized the "precious" or sacrificial
blood). Today the Yaqui Indians of Sonora - Arizona show crimson rosettes of ribbon,
wool or paper to indicate the "sangre de cristo" in their Easter Passion plays.
3 At Tepeapulco and Cholula. The Tepeapulco mural is illustrated in George Kubler's
Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, 1948), II. Fig. 399; the
Cholula mural by Manuel Toussaint in Arte Colonial en Mexico (Mexico City, 1948),
Fig. 32.
4Mildred Monteverde, "Iconography of 16th Century Atrio Crosses" SociedadMexicana
de Antropologia, XII mesa redonda, (Mexico City, 1975), pp. 161-166.
5Ibid. Sources for the passion symbolism on sixteenth century stone crosses were
thought to be portable crosses brought to Mexico by the Spaniards; see Jose Moreno
Villa, Lo Mexicano en las artes plasticas (Mexico City, 1948), pp. 24-28.
6Ibid. The face at the crossing distinguishes the Augustinian from Franciscan crosses.
Franciscans avoided this "anthropomorphization" and showed only the crown of thorns
at the crossing.
T h e author has seen these processions and has photographed at least three
flower-laden crosses.

43

LE
PETIT TABLIER
Rosalind Robinson

Were it not for his friendship with the writer-critic, Charles Baudelaire, little
would be known of the life or work of Constantin Guys. The former's search for an artist
who would represent his ideal of "the painter of modern life" resulted in his selection of
Guys as the one who would embody the spirit of contemporary life in mid-nineteenth
century France. Baudelaire's subsequent essay on Guys, published inLe Figaro in 1863,
brought this artist to the attention of the public. Unlike that of most of his contemporaries, Guys' subject matter involved neither classical inspiration nor the solace of
religion. He was interested in capturing life as it happened, almost in the sense of a
modern photographer.
Guys' life was one filled with travel and adventure. Born into an upper-middle
class family in Flessingue, Holland in 1802, he began his wanderings at the age of
eighteen, when he fought with Byron in the Greek wars, then served as a Dragoon in the
French army. When at age thirty-eight he left the army, he traveled through Spain, Italy,
Bulgaria, Egypt, and Algeria, making sketches. Thus he was not unfamiliar with the
exotic cultures he was to encounter as correspondent for the Illustrated London News
during the Crimean War from 1854-1856. It was at this time as well that photography
was coming into use as a journalistic medium, so Guys' desire to record historical events
in a moment was not too surprising. However, unlike some of his colleagues, Guys tended
to idealize what he saw. His emphasis lay more on the pomp and circumstance of military
ritual than on the horrors of war's destruction which were the preoccupation of contemporary photographers.
Upon returning to London after the war, Guys continued his attempt to
reproduce modern life in his drawings and water colors, but at this time his subject
matter became that of the elegant upper classes of Paris. Like his champion, Baudelaire,
Guys took pleasure in glorifying the "dandy," as well as his equally well-dressed female
counterpart. Ladies were depicted in their carriages, surrounded by dapper gentlemen,
with similarly elegant horses prancing spiritedly alongside. As in the wartime drawings,
44

Constantin Guys, Le Petit Tablier, (The Little Apron), c. 1830-1835. Pencil
with Watercolor Wash, 26.67 x 17.78 cm., unsigned, inexpensive paper,
Phoenix Art Museum 60-29.
45

costume was all-important to the artist. Indeed, it is only by way of current fashions that
it is at all possible to date the oeuvre of Guys, for he neither signed nor dated his drawings.
Even his friend Baudelaire was only allowed to refer to him in print by the initials, M.G.
(Monsieur Guys).
The chronology of Guys' works is most readily perceived through his depictions of the modes and coiffures of his own designs in relation to those of the period. I am
careful here to use the word chronology rather than evolution, because I don't think that
stylistic changes are that significant in Guys' works. His subject matter varies more from
decade to decade; he does not deviate much within a given period. He portrays men,
women, horses, and war in similar fashion, showing little developmental change until
the late 1850's when his subject matter turned from that of the upper classes to the Paris
demi-monde. It is from this time on that one can see differences in style, but no longer in
subject matter. For the rest of his life, Guys would depict the gradual decadence of
women, both in their character and in their costume.
In an article in the Gazette de Beaux Arts, July, 1956, entitled "La Vie de Guys
et la Chronologie de son Oeuvre," Jamar Rolin-Luce attempts to divide Guys' works into
five periods according to men's and women's styles of dress: 1830-35, 1840-50, 1850-60,
1860-70, and after 1870. It is by his system that I have assigned a date to the Phoenix Art
Museum drawing. I would suggest retitling the work Grisette; since I have been able to
date it approximately, it seems more logical to relate the name to the specific subject
matter rather than referring to the apron worn by Guys' women over a number
of years.
I have placed this drawing in the 1830-35 period, first according to the
hairstyle which was not worn after 1835. It, along with the costume, matches the one in a
drawing to which Rolin-Luce has attributed the same date. In his earlier drawings, as
exemplified by this one, Guys portrayed the "grisette," the working girl of Paris whose
youthful spirit and beauty enlivened the streets of that city. As here, she is usually seen
wearing a little apron, her hands thrust in its pockets. Her face is quite impersonal, a
quality which pervades Guys' works, regardless of social class. During this phase, her
skirt comes to her ankles, though her shoulders are bared and she wears a knotted neck
scarf which emphasizes the whiteness of her skin. Her hair is combed into three bunches,
the center one covered up by a little beribboned hat placed toward the front of her head.
After the Crimean War, along with the depiction of high society and eventually overtaking it as subject matter, the demi-monde or low life of Paris occupied Guys'
attention. By 1860 the scene had changed to that of the cabarets and bordellos. The little
"grisettes" were no longer in evidence, but had been replaced by the inhabitants of these
lascivious places. The girls were vulgarly bejeweled, with accompanying decadence in
dress, their uplifted skirts showing their defiance of polite society. The idealization
gradually disappeared and in his final phase, the lively colors, shimmering dresses, and
beautiful jewelry faded altogether. Guys seemed intent on removing all elements which
would detract from his depiction of human misery.
It is not difficult to see the germ of Guys' later work in the Phoenix Art
Museum drawing. One wonders, however, what caused this artist who at one time
romanticized war, and depicted the gracious life of the top strata of society, to concentrate
his later years on developing his subject matter in a much less pleasant direction.
There are several possible answers to this question. We are aware of his long
association with Nadar, an extraordinary man who was at different times and sometimes
simultaneously: a journalist, a balloonist, a draughtsman, a political agitator, and a
celebrated photographer. Such a man would be ever conscious of the changing face of
reality. Or did Guys fall under the spell of late nineteenth century mal-du-siecle, the
feeling of ennui with the monotony of life? Perhaps his association with Byron early in
life had implanted such ideas. Perhaps the change was due to his association with
46

Baudelaire, a man full of fears and insecurities, whose view of love became that of lust
and its attendant pleasure in doing evil. Both men were probably attempting to revolt
against the conventional sort of love and morality practiced by contemporary bourgeois
society, a society whose ordered security was also repugnant to the Impressionists.
For whatever reasons, Guys continued in his later vein until the end of his
life. In 1885, he delivered a number of his unsigned drawings to the Musee Carnavalet in Paris where an astute guard recognized them and was thus able to assure their
preservation.
Guys' importance as an artist lies not so much in the excellence of his style,
but rather as being the first to capture the "frozen moment" so essential to the Impressionists. A few of his drawings are said to have influenced Manet, but of even more
significance is Guys' preoccupation with the low life which opened up the way to the
subject matter dealt with so effectively by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Like Baudelaire
then, Guys was a transitional figure between the Romantics and the Impressionists and
Post-Impressionists. Although he never attained the prominence of those who benefitted
from his foundations, their debt to him should not be overlooked.

47

LA
REUNION
DES
PLUS CELEBRES
MONUMENTS ANTIQUES
DE LA FRANCE
Vicfei C. Wright
A drawing by Hubert Robert in the collection of the Phoenix Art Museum
(fig. 1), traditionally known as La Maison Carree et Monuments Antiques, has largely
eluded the attention of Robert scholars.1 The drawing, executed in pen and ink with
watercolor wash, is too precise and detailed to be classified as a sketch; rather, the style
and technique of this drawing suggest its function as an advanced preparatory study for
an oil painting. Indeed, the Phoenix Art Museum drawing can now be identified as a fully
developed study for La Reunion des Plus Celebres Monuments Antiques de la France in
the collection of the Pavlovsk Palace Museum in Leningrad, Russia.2
Hubert Robert (1735-1808), the French painter, decorator and garden designer, is noted for his romantic depictions of the architectural relics of Classical antiquity. Known by his contemporaries as "Robert des Ruines," he developed an aptitude
for the artistic genre of ruins during an eleven-year sojourn in Italy, where he executed a
vast number of sketches of the crumbling architectural monuments of the ancient Roman
Empire. As a student at the French Academy in Rome, Robert was strongly influenced by
the work of Pannini and of Piranesi. In fact, he collected works by these Italian masters
throughout the rest of his life, believing them to be largely responsible for his own success
as a painter of ruins.3 Returning to Paris in 1765, Robert enjoyed immediate success, in
both amateur and professional circles. He became a member of the Academy in 1766 and
exhibited in the Salons for the following thirty years.
With the increasing 18th-century interest in the ruin as an element of the
picturesque landscape, artists realized, in the third quarter of the century, that France
itself was a wealthy source of antique ruins dating from the Imperial Roman era. So it
was that, in 1783, Robert embarked on a journey through Provence in southern France,
sketching and recording each of the monuments he encountered. Between 1783 and 1787,
the artist utilized these sketches as the basis for a number of paintings depicting these
antiquities of France. Robert's renderings of these structures are generally faithful to
architectural detail, although he sometimes juxtaposed them within a single composi48

1
Hubert Robert, La Reunion Des Plus Celebres Monuments Antiques De La France.
Accession number 62-10, 38.2 x 54.2 cm., pen and ink with watercolor wash on paper.
49

2
Pietro Antonio Martini, The Exhibition at the Louvre, 1785. (Photograph courtesy of
Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

tion, with no regard for topographical accuracy. This can be seen in Robert's undated
drawing in the collection of the Phoenix Art Museum. The antique Roman structures
which have been grouped together to form this lyrical architectural landscape can be
identified as monuments from various locations in southern France. They are, from left
to right, the Amphitheater and the Maison Carree, both in Nimes, the Pont du Gard,
located just outside Nimes, the Monument and Triumphal Arch of St. Remy, the Triumphal Arch of Orange, and the Temple of Diana in Nimes.
In 1782, the Grand Due Paul Petrovitch of Russia, the son of Catherine the
Great and later Tsar Paul I, commissioned from Robert four large decorative panels to be
hung in his royal home. The artist executed these works, but, before sending them to
Russia, he exhibited two of them in the 1785 Salon of the Louvre. TheLivret of the Salon
lists one of these works as La Reunion des Plus Celebres Monumens (sic) Antiques de la
France and goes on to describe the content of this Reunion as the Arena and Maison
Carree in Nimes, the Pont du Gard, the Triumphal Arch and Monument of St. Remy, and
the Triumphal Arch of Orange.4 This entry has, in fact, described the monuments
depicted in the Phoenix Art Museum drawing, in the correct order, from left to right.
50

3

P.A. Martini, The Exhibition at the Louvre, 1785. (detail)

The relationship between the Phoenix drawing and the painting in Russia can
be further substantiated by turning to an engraving of the 1785 Salon of the Louvre by
P. A. Martini (fig. 2). A work illustrated in this engraving, located near the left corner of
the exhibition hall and in the second row from the top, appears to be the painting
described in the Livret entry. In subject matter and composition, its similarity to the
drawing in the Phoenix Art Museum is evident.
Writing in the Burlington Magazine in November 1972, M.R. Michel has
described the painting in Russia as "having as subject matter the Maison Carree, the Arc
de Triomphe at Orange, and in the background, the St. Remy antiquities and the Pont du
Gard."5 Her description has provided a more complete visual conception of the painting in
Russia, by placing the monuments in their correct spatial relationships. The differentiation between foreground and background elements verifies the identification of the work
illustrated in Martini's engraving and further supports the connection of the Phoenix
drawing to the painting in the Pavlovsk Palace Museum.
The engraving by Martini and the literary descriptions of Robert's painting in
Russia provide sufficient evidence of the close relationship between the drawing and the
51

painting. The tight and fairly meticulous execution of the drawing does indeed indicate
its role as an advanced study for the painting. The drawing, then, may be more suitably
entitled La Reunion des Plus Celebres Monuments Antiques de la France, in accordance
with the title of the painting. The identification of the drawing as a preparatory study
helps to establish its date of execution between 1783, when Robert first recorded the
antiquities of Provence, and 1785, when the Reunion painting was exhibited at the Salon
of the Louvre. Certainly, the connection between the drawing in the Phoenix Art
Museum and the painting in the Pavlovsk Palace Museum establishes the drawing as a
work of major significance for the study of the oeuvre of Hubert Robert.

FOOTNOTES
! The

content of this article is based on research conducted for a seminar at Arizona State
University, under the direction of Professor Anthony Lacy Gully. I wish to express my
gratitude both to Professor Gully and to Professor Hugh T. Broadley, who brought to
my attention P. A. Martini's engraving of the Salon of 1785.
2At the time of publication, a reproduction of this painting in the Pavlovsk Palace
Museum was unavailable for study. Though the painting, La Reunion des Plus Celebres
Monuments Antiques de la France, has been cited in literary references, it appears to be
unreproduced. However, a relationship between the Phoenix Art Museum drawing and
the painting in Russia can be developed with the aid of an engraving by P. A. Martini
and descriptions of the painting found in literary sources.
3Alexandre Paillet's catalogue of the sale of Robert's cabinet, held on April 5, 1809,
reproduced in C. Gabillot, Hubert Robert et son Temps (Paris, 1895), pp. 258-59.
4"Salon de 1785," Collection des Livrets des Anciennes Expositions, XXXIII (Paris,
1870), p. 22.
5M.R. Michel, "L'Art du Dix-huitieme Siecle. A Taste for Classical Antiquity in Town
Planning Projects: Two Aspects of the Art of Hubert Robert," Burlington Magazine,
CXIV (November, 1972), supp. p. iv.

52

AN UNPUBLISHED
ROWLANDSON
SKETCHBOOK
Anthony Lacy Gully

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) is best remembered today for his humorous
drawings and prints, and as a book illustrator of merit and originality.1 The comic and
gently satiric are associated with his art. For this reason a discussion of an unpublished
sketchbook in the drawing collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is
important to draw attention to an ignored aspect of Rowlandson's art, his interest in and
understanding of the art of the past.2
The album in the V&A contains 180 pencil and pen and ink drawings, some
with grey or brown watercolor wash.3 Though titled Sketches from the Antique, several of
the drawings reveal Rowlandson's interest in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and
contemporary scenes of Italian life. The V&A album differs from five other recorded
"scrapbooks" of antique subjects in that it is the only one in which drawings were done
directly onto the pages of the sketchbook; of the 130 pages, 92 are drawn directly into the
album, 28 drawings have been pasted into the album and 8 pages are filled with text in
the artist's hand or are blank.4 Two drawings on pages 110 and 124 are not by Thomas
Rowlandson. The remaining scrapbooks consist of small drawings of varying sizes glued

to the albums' pages. The V&A album is unique in that the artist has inscribed much
information on its pages which indicates that Rowlandson travelled in Italy sometime in
the early 1820's when most of these "classical" studies appear to have been executed.
None of the drawings in any of the six albums carries a signature or date. Watermarks on
the individual sheets provide approximate dates. The V&A album is made from paper
carrying the watermarks Stains and Co, 1820 and I&M, 1820.
The numerous drawings of antique subjects that Rowlandson executed late in
his life, he was 64 in 1820, have long puzzled scholars. They are among the artist's last
productions; serious illness in 1825 left him incapacitated and he died in London in 1827.
The V&A album, like the remaining five scrapbooks, is not unlike a student's copybook.
54

'kte

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S B I i M l l i l i l l l l l l 'HEiJilfe^Siii^ Jll«

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VAU
1
Thomas Rowlandson, Three Philosophers,' Sketches from the Antique, p. 13.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
55

The V&A album is the only one in which the artist has created his own classical
narratives and genre scenes.5 Though these compositions are often loosely based on
antique sculpture, many are the artist's own invention, and demonstrate his interest in
turning classical images into a form of personal expression as did so many of his
neoclassical contemporaries.
Rowlandson, unlike so many of his peers, did not publish theories. We find no
lucid discourses like those of Reynolds, penetrating lectures such as those delivered by
Constable, the occasional aphorisms by Fuseli and certainly not the mystic diatribes of
William Blake. All these men were Rowlandson's contemporaries; all responded either
positively or negatively to the official stance of the Royal Academy. Intellectual
hypothesizing held no appeal for Rowlandson. We deduce all we can from his drawings
and prints, and the scattered remarks found in the pages of the V&A album may help to
clarify his response to the art of the past.
There has existed for many years general confusion on just what sources
Rowlandson turned to for his studies of the antique. In the catalogue of the Rowlandson
drawings in the Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery Robert Wark determined that the
drawings in the two scrapbooks in the British Museum were derived from line engravings that Thomas Piroli executed for the four-volume, illustrated catalogue of the Musee
Napoleon, Les monumens (si c) antique de Musee Napoleon* Wark wrote that the majority
of such sketches were "copied from engravings rather than actual objects."7 John Hayes
in 1972 argued conversely that, though many of the drawings were apparently derived
from book illustrations, it is "unlikely the majority" were.8 Baskett and Snelgrove in their
recent catalogue of the Rowlandson drawings in the Mellon Collection (British Art
Center, Yale University) erroneously suggested that Rowlandson may have made his
antique studies while visiting the Musee Napoleon in Paris in 1814.9 There are, however,
no drawings after the antique of the type found in the recorded albums which carry a
watermark earlier than 1817.10 Of all the suggestions put forth perhaps John Hayes most
accurately suggests the probable sources employed by Rowlandson. Wark chooses to
focus his attention exclusively on the British Museum albums, ignoring the V&A album,
and Hayes, interested in its unique character, quite correctly assumes that a number of
the drawings were not merely copied from an illustrated folio. The sources Rowlandson
depended upon were, however, far more wide-ranging than has hitherto been acknowledged.
Les monumens antique du Musee Napoleon, produced between 1804 and 1806,
was one of several books published in Paris in the early years of the century to record the
works appropriated by Napoleon from European collections to form the Musee Napoleon.11 Wark is correct about the drawings in the British Museum scrapbooks; many are
simple line drawings after the Piroli engravings. Rowlandson even frequently duplicated
the double border used by Piroli and included the French titles in elaborate script. The
drawings in the British Museum, like those in the British Art Center album or a single
drawing at the Huntington, often repeat very faithfully Piroli's designs. The V&A album
has only one drawing, on page 107 glued into the book, which duplicates Piroli's line
technique and border arrangement found in the two British Museum albums. The subject
is the "Hermaphrodite" from the Borghese Collection.12 The short Appendix at the
conclusion of these pages clearly shows that though a good number of the drawings in the
V&A album are based upon illustrations found in Les monumens antique, a good number
are not, and it must be assumed that Rowlandson actually visited a number of important
art collections in Italy near the end of his life. Rowlandson may have begun to copy
Piroli's designs as early as 1817, judging from watermarks on some of the British
Museum drawings. It seems more likely that he produced the vast majority, if not all,
after 1819; the greatest percentage of drawings in the V&A album and in the British
Museum scrapbooks have watermarks of 1820 and 1821.
56

ZmriTE

3
Thomas Rowlandson, 'Roman
Couple,' Sketches from the Antique, p. 7.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees
of the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.

2
Thomas Rowlandson, 'Euripedes';
'Menander and Demonthenes,' Sketches
from the Antique, p. 23. Reproduced by
courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.
57

V A M,

4
Thomas Rowlandson, 'Scene of Domestic Betrayal'; 'Juno, Jupiter and
Venus Relief from Turin,' Sketches from the Antique, p. 25. Reproduced by
courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
58

One of the perplexing problems related to the studies after the antique is what
prompted Rowlandson to produce multiple copies of the individual Piroli designs. The
V&A album explains, in part, this peculiarity and demonstrates what Rowlandson often
did with the Piroli compositions. For example, Napoleon took from the Vatican a group of
marbles traditionally identified as famous philosophers and writers of antiquity. On
page 68 of the V&A album is a drawing of Menander, Possidippus and Demosthenes.13
Demosthenes is repeated twice again in the V&A album. On page 13, (fig. 1) we see
Demosthenes listening to two robed men.14 Rowlandson slightly altered the drapery and
pose of the hands. Rowlandson, by casting Demosthenes in this little narrative scene, is
engaging in a form of simple genre drama much favored in the V&A album. Demosthenes
is found again on page 23 (fig. 2) again in the company of Menander. This drawing is
typical of many in the V&A sketchbook in which Rowlandson carefully worked up the
forms and emphasized modeling through the use of watercolor wash. This attention to the
plastic qualities of the original sculpture is in contrast to the relatively flat engravings
by Piroli. At the top of the page is a sketch of a small marble relief of Euripides from the
collection in the Villa Albani.15
Page 7 (fig. 3) is yet another example of Rowlandson having taken a Piroli
design as a departure for a little vignette. The pen and ink drawing at the bottom of the
page shows a young woman reclining on a couch listening in rapt attention to a handsome
youth. She and the furnishings are lifted from Piroli's engraving of Bacchus and Icarus, a
bas-relief panel from an antique sarcophagus in the Villa Albani Collection16 In addition
to eschewing all references to mythology, Rowlandson further reduces the original scene
into something casual by making subtle changes in the three legs which support the
table. In the original relief, and more especially in Piroli's elegant neoclassic engraving,

5
Thomas Rowlandson, 'Nereid Sacrophagus' (Capitoline); 'Birth or Triumph of
Venus,' Sketches from the Antique, p. 114. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
59

6
Thomas Rowlandson, Italian Peasant
Girl,' Sketches from the Antique, p. 92.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of
the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

7
Thomas Rowlandson, 'Two Dancing Girls,' Sketches from the Antique, p. 46.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
60

8
Thomas Rowlandson, 'Rape of Persephone' (Bernini) and Other Antique
Studies, Sketches from the Antique, p. 12. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of
the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

61

9
Thomas Rowlandson, Triton Fountain' (Bernini), Sketches from the
Antique, p. 21. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.

62

1 0 Thomas Rowlandson, 'Sketches after Raphael,'
Sketches from the Antique, p. 72. Reproduced by
courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.

1 1 Thomas Rowlandson, 'The Statuary Yard,' Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Ashmolean Museum.
63

the table is supported by three slender hooved legs. Rowlandson replaces these with
bulbous, paw-like supports, which literally animate the scene. On several of the pages of
the V&A sketchbook, unlike other scrapbooks, are detailed drawings after the Piroli
engravings, juxtaposed to classical designs of Rowlandson's own invention. On the lower
half of page 25 (fig. 4) is a drawing of a marble relief of J upiter flanked by Juno and Venus
from Turin, which was for a time in Napoleon's collection.17 Above this is a dramatic
scene, the subject and composition having no parallel in the illustrated or written
catalogues of the Musee Napoleon. Similarly, on page 114 (fig. 5) the lower half of the
page is filled with a lovely drawing of the birth or triumph of Venus, rendered as a
shallow bas-relief. It recalls Rowlandson's rococo elegance of the 1780's and 1790's.
Though closely resembling several artists' handling of this theme, the composition
appears to be original. The drawing is not based on any works illustrated in Les monumens antique. Above this composition, clearly related in spirit, is a finely worked
drawing of the Nereid Sarcophagus taken by Napoleon from the Capitoline Museum in
Rome and placed in the Hall of the Emperors of the Musee Napoleon.18
The sources for the drawings in the V&A album are diffuse. There are five
notations in Rowlandson's hand which suggest that he was taking a sketch in a particular collection.19 There is a revealing note on page 55 in which the artist remarks that he is
disturbed with a restorer who was working on a relief of the Oceanides. Rowlandson
claimed that his own sketch more accurately reflected the antique original and conformed to the last act scene in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.20 Ten pages carry small
pencil sketches, some touched with ink accents, of sites in Italy. John Hayes has noted
such a drawing, on page 80, of the Rialto Bridge in Venice. There is only one drawing, on
page 61, in the V&A album of an art work in Venice, an antique sarcophagus relief of the
Suovetaurila (sacrificial offering of a bull), from the library of San Marco. This object had
been in the Hall of Apollo of the Musee Napoleon and was illustrated, too, by Piroli.21 As
Rowlandson's drawing exactly accords with Piroli's engraving, it seems safe to assume
that Rowlandson knew the work from Les Monumens antique and did not seek it out in

1 2 Thomas Rowlandson, 'Bathing Vessel, Villa Medici'; 'Medusa Relief' (Chateau
Richelieu), Sketches from the Antique,^. 66. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
64

Venice. There are no suggestions that Rowlandson was attracted by the sensual painting
tradition of Venice in the V&A album. The remaining nine drawings of buildings or
piazzi illustrate locations in Rome. On page 21 is a faithful rendering of Bernini's Triton
fountain in the Piazza Barberini, on page 30 a view of St. Peters from Bernini's colonnade; page 70 shows Trajan's Column, and on pages 50, 64, 74 and 106 are various
churches or squares of Rome all suitably identified in Rowlandson's hand.22
Four pages in the album are not based on the art of antiquity but suggest
contemporary scenes Rowlandson may have encountered in Italy. On page 92 (fig. 6) is a
pen and ink drawing over pencil of a young Italian girl in picturesque costume. Three
young peasants, who are perhaps gambling, are sketched on page 102. Their attire is very
close to that of a young shepherd piper found at the bottom of page 127 who plays for the
amusement of a dancing peasant girl and an elegantly robed maenad. On page 46 (fig. 7)
there is a small line drawing of two girls in flowing gowns dancing. The drawing, glued to
the page, carries no watermark. As reproduced one can see that immediately following
the drawing of the dancers is a portrayal of two equally elegant Greek musicians. The
lyricism of these musicians, in their complicated costumes, recalls Attic red figure
painting. The drawings complement one another. Rowlandson's frequent habit of pairing
drawings or prints for contrast or accent is found throughout the V&A album. Only in
this album does one find the careful juxtaposition of drawings which complement one
another thematically or compositionally.
That the drawings of places and persons which Rowlandson encountered in
Italy are scattered randomly in the album is not surprising. In none of the albums,
particularly in those at the British Museum and at the British Art Center which depend
so heavily on the Piroli engravings, does Rowlandson duplicate the order of the plates of
Les monumens antique. In the V&A album, as well, those designs based upon Piroli's
work are not found in a sequence which agrees with the order in Piroli's four-volume
work.
On six pages there are drawings of the art of Italy in the sixteenth and

1 3 Thomas Rowlandson, 'Agamemmon and Cassandra,' Sketches from the Antique,
pp. 84-85. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
65

seventeenth centuries. On page 5 are two views of a family group, based upon one of
Michelangelo's pendentive paintings of the "Ancestors of Christ" on the Sistine ceiling.23
Rowlandson adds a child to the original group and turns the three figures to the right in a
profile study at the bottom of the page. On page 12 (fig. 8) is a sheet composed of seven
sculptural groups; composite drawings of this sort are frequently found in the V&A
album and not the other scrapbooks.24 In the center of the page is a free adaptation of
Gianlorenzo Bernini's Pluto and Persephone group from the Borghese Collection. Rowlandson adds a female figure near the base and alters Persephone's pose. The purpose of
the drawing seems to be a study of complicated contrapposto; the Wrestlers, Lion and
Horse, Panther and Bull, and the Lapith and Centaur group all exhibit complicated
twisting forms in space. Page 21 (fig. 9), is a straightforward rendering of Bernini's
Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barbarini. Rowlandson paid particular attention to the
dolphins at the base, especially attracted by the grotesque character of their heads. It is
interesting that this album, which appears to predate Rowlandson's comic study of the
grotesque, Comparative Anatomy, should contain such a large number of grotesque
studies.25 At the top center of page 41 is a correct drawing of Giovanni da Bologna's "Rape
of the Sabine" in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. It is flanked by a rough sketch of the
"River Tiber" and the "Ariadne" from the Vatican Collection.26 Below in two horizontal
registers are five different Venuses and a nude Apollo.27 The page is concerned with
symmetry and monumental nude forms. Lastly, on page 72, are a series of sketches
connected with Raphael and his school. (Fig. 10) shows a detail from the upper left; it is a
re-working of a group from Raphael's "Fire in the Borgo" from the Stanze del Incendio. In
the Raphael the figures represent Aeneas carrying his father Anchises from the flames of
Troy. Rowlandson, with characteristic license, has changed Anchises to a rather lumpy
female. The remaining studies on this page are taken from Raphael's Sala di Psyche.
Rowlandson in his own hand in the V&A album tells of two other literary
sources which contributed to the sketches in the album. On page 104 Rowlandson says
that the drawing was based upon "Sommes Travels." I have been unable to trace this
volume in the British Museum or National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, but since the figure the artist refers to is ancient Egyptian, it might be the
source for the thirteen pages which illustrate Egyptian antiquities. Similar Egyptian
subjects are common in the other scrapbooks. Only one work from Egypt is illustrated in
Les monumens antique, an alabastor idol from the Villa Albani Collection. This colossal
statue was placed in the Hall of Apollo of the Musee Napoleon and had by 1815 been
returned to Rome. Rowlandson's drawing of this cult statue is found on page 105 of the
V&A album.28
A reference to a second literary source is on page 120. Below a drawing of two
wrestlers entitled by the artist "Olympic Games," Rowlandson has written "page 416, vol
I Potter's Antiquities of Greece." The artist is referring to John Potter's Archaeologia
Graeca or The Antiquities of Greece first published by Potter when he was a fellow at
Lincoln's College, Oxford, in 1619. A classical scholar of renown, Potter was later to
become the Archbishop of Canterbury. The text of the book is a description of Greek
social, military and religious life drawn from extracts of ancient texts. The earliest
edition was illustrated by an unknown wood engraver, and the 1813 edition, much
revised and enlarged, was embellished with engraved plates by W. and D. Lizars of
Edinburgh. None of the editions which Rowlandson could have known from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century possesses illustrations which accord with
Rowlandson's composition. In fact, the artist seemed to base his drawing on a careful
reading of Potter's text which describes the Olympian contests from extracts of Milo's
Epigrams and the writings of Plutarch.29
Rowlandson could not but be touched by the neoclassic movement, which had
even in his student days at the Royal Academy already asserted itself. The V&A album
and other scrapbooks are rare in the artist's oeuvre because of the serious manner with
66

which classical imagery is handled.30 However, there are two important exceptions to this
generalization in the V&A album. On page 80 we find in light pencil a caricature of two
cognoscenti ogling with glasses an Egyptian mummy who stares back at them in alarm
and disgust. Ronald Paulsen, in his provocative Rowlandson, A New Interpretation
(1972), devotes a short section to "people looking at things," and certainly Rowlandson
often portrays individuals peering openly or secretively at people or at works of art.31
What Paulsen does not note is that Rowlandson often uses the comic device of having an
art work stare back at the human participants. This occurs on page 80 of the V&A album
and superbly in Rowlandson's drawing, "The Statuary Yard," (fig. 11) in the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford. A mason and his clients inspect copies after the antique and one
identifiable modern work, Bernini's Borghese "Apollo and Daphne." The humor of this
drawing comes from the erotic interplay of the statuary contrasted to the deadly earnest
and pedantic behavior of the humans. Many of the statues smile knowingly at those
below them. Rowlandson saw more vitality in the ample nude forms than in the intellectual musings of the customers. As the young woman at the left, accompanied by an old
gouty gentleman, glances up slyly at a young Apollo's genitals, a nude Venus on the
opposite side of the drawing bends forward to inspect a nude youth, and a quotation of the
Vatican's "River Nile" smiles benignly at the antics of a nymph and satyr group; a lovely
torso of a Venus lies atop (surely not accidentally) a leering satyr. One feels that
Rowlandson found aesthetic speculation foolish in comparison with life, here represented
by the supposedly inert sculpture. This same device of contrast between the unashamed
sexuality visualized through works of art, especially ancient classical art, and the foolish
constraints and taboos of polite society frequently emerge in Rowlandson's art. His comic
prints of the artist/aesthetician Joseph Nollekins or his well-known "Exhibition Stare

1 4 Thomas Rowlandson, 'Groom Struggling with a Team of Horses,' Sketches from the
Antique, p. 52. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.
67

Case" are good examples. Another example with devastating success is Rowlandson's
satirical print of Lord Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton secretely embracing in
her husband's collection of antiquities. The mummies, statues and vases all delight in
this scene of infidelity.
On pages 66 and 67 (fig. 12) of the V&A album are several related sketches.
Page 66 illustrates, complete with measurements, a "bathing vessel" which Rowlandson
notes had been "lately removed from the Villa Medici to Florence." Below this is a
drawing of a marble relief of Medusa from the collection in the Chateau Richelieu and
illustrated by Piroli.32 On the opposite page is a second "bathing vase" which Rowlandson
states is of "red Oriental granite from the Collection in the Vatican." Below this is a small
comic scene entitled "Greek Lady at the Bath." A very startled nude looks back in dismay
as a servant girl pours water on her back. The arms and head of the nude are rather
awkwardly drawn and, if removed, she closely resembles the "Crouching Venus" or
Venus of Vienna in the Louvre. Without the small human interlude these two pages
would appear to be the work of a diligent tourist.
Two final pages demonstrate the two contrasting drawing styles found in the
V&A album. Most of the drawings reproduced here and in the sketchbook have the wiry
outline typical of the neoclassic movement, and not infrequently found in Rowlandson's
late work. Typical of such drawings in the V&A album is the only drawing to cover two
entire pages, pages 84-5 (fig. 13), a fine line drawing of the triumphant return of
Agamemnon with the captive, ill-fated Cassandra sharing his chariot. The flatness of the
design and linear patterning are reminiscent of Greek vase painting, or the work of such
contemporaries as Flaxman. Very different in character is a spirited drawing of a groom
trying to manage a team of unruly horses who pull a richly decorated chariot (fig. 14).
This drawing, on page 52, displays that ebullient energetic line which has always made
Rowlandson's drawings so appealing. The contrast of these two works clearly shows how
much restraint Rowlandson was striving for in the majority of these "antique studies."
Though classical subjects are often considered atypical of Rowlandson the
large number of drawings of classical subjects directly derived from Les monumens
antique or freely invented by Rowlandson during his last sojourn to Italy clearly reflect
that, though he may have had suspicion of the theoretic pronouncements of his contemporaries on antique art, an encounter with classical art sparked a sincere appreciation of
its beauty. Thomas Rowlandson's unique sketchbook in the Victoria and Albert Museum
is a singularly important document in attesting to Rowlandson's serious regard for the
art of the past.

Appendix
Description of V&A Album titled: Rowlandson: Sketches from the Antique. Album of 130
pages. 178 drawings drawn or mounted on cream wove paper. Pages are bound between
marbled boards measuring 23.5 x 19.1 cm. The accession number of the volume is
E 3242-3340-1938. Provenance: Gilbertson Collection; acquired by Victoria and Albert
in 1938.
All measurements are given with height preceding width. All drawings measuring 23.3 x
19.0 cm. are drawn directly onto the album's pages. Titles set off with quotation marks
indicate titles indicated in the artist's hand. Titles are marked with an asterisk if
dependent upon Les monumens antique.
68

Page No.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

7.
8.

9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.

Title of Drawing

Measurements

Accession No.

Five Urns. Aescapalus, Hercules
and Telephylos
Nine Ancient Vases
* Meanads, Meleager,
* Apollo Belvedere
"Vase in the Vatican Collection"
Family Group after Michelangelo's
'Ancestors of Christ'
(a) Three Ancient Vases verso:
Apollo in Chariot
(b) Four Ancient Vases
Apollo and Diana (?);
* Roman Couple
(a) Three Ancient Vases verso:
columns of numbers;
artist's accounts.
(b) Three Ancient Vases
* "Vase de Sosibius" and other
Ancient Vases
Sixteen Ancient Vases
Three Greek Maidens
"Rape of Persephone" and Other
Studies of Antique Sculpture
* "Ceremonies Dionysiaques" and
* Three Philosophers
* "Euterpe and Melpomene"
* "Sarcophagus, Museum Capitoline"
* "Tersichore" (sic)
* "Clio, Calliope, Thalia and Urania"
* "Autel de Mars"
* "Cippe D'Amenptus"
"Cineraire"
Bernini's Triton Fountain
* Cere's Throne, Vatican Coll.
"Euripides," Menander and
* Demonthenes
* Chair of Bacchus, Vatican Coll.
Scene of Domestic Betrayal;
* Juno, Jupiter and Venus Relief
from Turin
Three Egyptian Mummies
Ceremonial Chariot
Egyptian Antiquities;
Three Grotesque Heads
Identical to page 26
St. Peters, Rome
(a) "Victorious Warrior descended
from his Car,"
(b) "Various Grecian Helmets"
(a) Three Female Musicians
* (b) Choeurs Musicaux Relief

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3242

20.0 x 15.9 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3243
E 3244

18.3 x 11.5 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3245
E 3246

8.1 x 15.0 cm.

E 3247

7.8 x 15.2 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3248
E 3249

7.9 x 15.0 cm.

E 3250

11.5 x 8.2 cm
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3251
E 3252

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
19.5 x 16.8 cm.

E 3253
E 3254
E 3255

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3256

23.3
23.3
23.3
23.3
17.5
23.3
16.8
16.8
15.9
23.3

E
E
E
E
E
E
E
E
E
E

69

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

19.0
19.0
19.0
19.0
11.5
19.0
11.7
19.0
11.4
19.0

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

3257
3258
3259
3260
3258
3259
3260
3261
3262
3263

15.9 x 11.8 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3264
E 3265

19.7 x 15.4 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3266
E 3267
E 3267 (verso)

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3268
E 3268 (verso)
E 3269

10.1 x 14.1 cm.
11.1. x 9.1 cm.

E 3270
E 3271

Page No.

33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.

Title of Drawing

Measurements

Accession No.

"Amour" a Relief; Bacchic Procession
Blank
"Marble Chair of Potaman, The
Lesbian Rhetorician"
Grotesque Studies
* "Trepid" and "Siege"
Grotesque Masks
Altar Base and Circular Relief
Classical Male Figure
"Rape of the Sabines," and other
sculptural groups.
* Sarcophagus of the Muses from the
Capitoline, Rome
Hercules (?)
Blank
Text only.
Two Dancing Girls
Two Greek Musicians
Blank
* Aesculapius, Telephylos and
Hygeia
* "Marriage Grec," View of two unidentified churches in Rome (?)
* "Achille e Scyros," Birth of
Bacchus Relief
Groom Struggling with Team
of Horses
* "Andromache" (Actually the
'Ariadne' in the Vatican Coll.)
"Diomedes"
"The Ociannitide," extensive
descriptive text.
Painter "EBKPATHE" with
maidservant
Polynices and Etocles borne from
the field of battle
Execution Scene
Two Larvae Vessels
* "Naissance de Bacchus"
* "Sacrifice a Minerve"
Blank
Death of Brutus' wife, Portia;
extensive descriptive text.
"Sta. Maria del Popolo"
Antique Altar; The Judgement of
Paris
"Bathing Vessel," Villa Medici,
* Medusa Relief, Chateau Richelieu
"Grand Antique Bathing Vase;"
* "Greek Lady at her Bath"
* "Demosthenes, Posidippe and
Menandre"

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3272

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3273

21.9
23.3
20.6
23.3
23.3
23.3

E 3274
E 3275
E 3276
E 3277
E 3277 (verso)
E 3278

70

x
x
x
x
x
x

17.1
19.0
17.5
19.0
19.0
19.0

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

10.2 x 18.4 cm.

E 3279

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3280

18.3 x 12.8 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3281
E 3282

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3283

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3283 (verso)

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3284

15.0 x 19.7 cm.

E 3285

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3286

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3286 (verso)
E 3287

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3288

18.4 x 15.1 cm.
E 3289
23.3
11.2
23.3
10.8
23.3

x
x
x
x
x

19.0
15.6
19.0
15.9
19.0

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

E
E
E
E

3290
3291
3292
3293

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3294

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3294 (verso)
E 3295

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3295 (verso)

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3296

15.0 x 20.6 cm.

E 3297

Page No.

69
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.

Title of Drawing

Measurements

Accession No.

* Relief of a Libation;
* "Choeurs Musicaux"
Trajan's Column, Rome
A Renaissance Fountain
(unidentified)
Sketches after Raphael
* Three Fauns
"Fontane di Ponti Sisto,"
"Sta. Maria Martyrs," Rome
* "Erato et Socrates" (relief);
* "Calliope et Homere" (relief);
* "Cineraire de Claudius Heracles"
* "Monument de deux femmes"
Sea Gods relief
(a) Judgement of Paris relief;
descriptive text (in French);
(b) Classical Nude with Soldiers
* "Laocoon;" lengthy text.
Ponte Rialto, Venice; Heracles (?)
Etruscan Tomb, River Nile (?),
Vatican Collection
* "Candelabre"
"Biga in the Vatican"
(a ceremonial chariot)
Agamemnon and Cassandra
Agamemnon and Cassandra
Young Man Mourning
Roman armor
"Candelabre"
Bacchanalian relief; "Egyptian
Capitals and Base of Column"
"Bacchus et Silene" (relief);
* Comedien ou Historien"
Birth of Bacchus (?); Dionysiac
* Suppliant
Italian Peasant Girl
* "Menander"
"Old Man's Head placed on Young
Shoulders"
Theatrical Roman Masks
Greek Warriors
* Menelaus and Four Helmets
Three Egyptian Statues;
extensive descriptive texts.
* Sphinx
"Musical Instruments"
Procession; Classical Head, Four
Daggers
Italian Peasants Gambling
Three Maenads
Egyptian Antiquities; caricature

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3298

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3298 (verso)
E 3299

19.9 x 16.2 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3300
E 3301
E 3301 (verso)

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3302

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
22.1 x 16.0 cm.

E 3302 (verso)
E 3303
E 3304

10.9
23.3
23.3
23.3

E
E
E
E

71

x
x
x
x

16.0
19.0
19.0
19.0

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

3305
3306
3306 (verso)
3307

15.1 x 7.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3308
E 3309

23.3 x 38.0 cm.

E
E
E
E
E
E

23.3
23.3
15.5
23.3

x
x
x
x

19.0
19.0
6.9
19.0

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

3310
3310
3310 (verso)
3311
3312
3313

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3313 (verso)

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3314

20.6 x 15.5 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3315
E 3316
E 3316 (verso)

23.3
23.3
23.3
23.3

E
E
E
E

x
x
x
x

19.0
19.0
19.0
19.0

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

3317
3317 (verso)
3318
3318 (verso)

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3319
E 3319 (verso)
E 3320

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3320 (verso)
E 3321
E 3321 (verso)

Page No.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.

124.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.

Title of Drawing
of two cognoscenti with mummy
* "Idole d'Albastre;" Three
Egyptian Statues
"St. Paul XIV," "S. M. Egizziaca"
(Rome)
* (a) Dying Gaul, Vatican Collection
* (b) "Hermaphrodite" (Borghese Coll.)
Five Grotesque Heads
Two Seated Classical Women
Three Classical Dancers
(NOT BY ROWLANDSON)
"Vertumnus"
Text defining a caduceus.
"Scenic Masks"
* Nereid Sarcophagus (Capitoline);
Birth of Venus
"Hercules and Apollon;"
* "Choeurs Musicaux"
Blank
Blank
Two Greek Warriors
"Grecian Warriors"
"Olympic Games"
"Grecian Warriors"
Two Wrestlers
* "Hermaphrodite;"
* Venus d'Medici, Bathing
* Venus (Louvre); Bathing
* Venus (Vatican)
A Philosopher (?)
(NOT BY ROWLANDSON)
Greek Man and Woman
"Antique Bronze" (M. Mitchell
Collection)
An Ancient Vase; Shepherd Piper
and Dancing Peasant and Maenad

Monkey-headed Man with Dogs
and Serpents
Reclining Woman Fountain;
"Egyptian Headresses"
Blank

72

Measurements

Accession No.

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3322

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3322 (verso)

11.1
11.4
21.7
23.3
25.5

E
E
E
E
E

x
x
x
x
x

8.0
17.7
17.8
19.0
16.1

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

3323
3324
3325
3326
3327

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3328

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3329
E 3330

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3331

23.3
23.3
23.3
23.3
23.3
23.3

E
E
E
E
E
E

x
x
x
x
x
x

19.0
19.0
19.0
19.0
19.0
19.0

cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.
cm.

3332
3333
3333 (verso)
3334
3334 (verso)
3335

20.5 x 16.1 cm.

E 3336

23.3 x 19.0 cm.
17.8 x 11.3 cm.

E 3337
E 3338

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3339

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3339 (verso)

23.3 x 19.0 cm.

E 3340

FOOTNOTES
'Grateful acknowledgement must be made to Arizona State University for a sabbatical
leave granted the spring of 1979 which made the following research possible and to the
Mabel McLeod Lewis Foundation which sponsored my initial investigations of the art
of Thomas Rowlandson.
2For their assistance and permission to reproduce works from their collections the
author thanks the staffs of the Print and Drawing Rooms of the Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford, the British Museum, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
3The Victoria and Albert Album (referred to in the text as the V&A album), measures
23.5 x 19.1 cm; it consists of 130 pages of cream wove paper bound between marbled
boards. The accession number is E-3242-3340-1938. Acquired in 1938. Provenance:
Gilbertson Collection.
4The other known scrapbooks of antique subjects are:
(a) British Museum, Album BM 201.a.l4.
Sketches of the Antique, acquired 1885. Accession number BM
1885-7-11-1-145. Provenance: Gilbertson Collection. 145
drawings in pen and ink.
(b) British Museum, Album BM 201.a.l5.
Sketches of the Antique, acquired 1885. Accession number BM
1885-7-11-146-208. Provenance: Gilbertson Collection. 63
drawings of antique busts in pen and ink.
(c) British Art Centre, Yale University, Catalogue
No. 345. of John Baskett and Dudley Snelgrove, The Drawings of
Thomas Rowlandson in the Mellon Collection, (London, 1977),
87. Titled: Drawings from the Antique. Provenance: H.D. Lyon
Collection, Paul Mellon Collection. 35 drawings in pen and ink.
(d) Gilbert Davis Collection
Location of album unknown at present. Davis records a
scrapbook in his possession with 60 drawings, Gilbert Davis,
Watercolours and Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson, (London,
1950), p. 2.
(e) An album, location unknown. Recorded sale of album of "antique
studies" at Christies, London, July 25, 1938, lot 45. Lit: Robert
Wark, Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson in the Huntington
Collection, (San Marino, California), 1975, p. 117.
There are also a very large number of drawings not bound in volumes which regularly
appear on the market. A sizeable collection of drawings of antique vases is in the
possession of G.D. Lockett, Clonterbank Trust, Cheshire, England.
5The

only known exception to this generalization is a small drawing in the British Art
Center album. In the Baskett and Snelgrove catalogue is reproduced a drawing entitled
"Woman at Well," Cat. no. 345/35. This small work, the last in the scrapbook, is similar
in spirit to the narrative scenes found in the V&A sketchbook.
6Wark, Rowlandson in Huntington, 117. Wark cities J.G. Schweighaeuser as the
author; actually he wrote the text only for volume I (1804); the remaining three
volumes were written by Louis P. Radel. Volume III (1805) is the major source for the
albums in the British Museum; its subject is illustrious Romans.
7Ibid.
8John Hayes, Rowlandson Watercolours and Drawings, (London, 1972), p. 62.
9Baskett and Snelgrove, Rowlandson in Mellon Collection, p. 86.
,0In the British Museum album 201.a. 14 five drawings carry a watermark with the date
1817. They are: 1885-7-11 - Numbers 100, 107, 124, 132 and 136; In British Museum
album 201.a. 15 there are eight drawings with a watermark of 1817. They are:
1885-7-11 - Numbers 147,149,162,163,170,178,187 and 191. The V&A album has one
73

drawing, page 32, Catalogue E3270, with this early date. Baskett and Snelgrove record
no watermarks in the British Art Centre album probably because all drawings are
glued firmly to pages of album.
u The official guidebook Notice des Statues, bustes et bas-reliefs de lagalerie des antiques
du Musee, (Paris, 1814) is very dependent upon Les monumens antique as is an
anonymously written English guidebook entitled A Descriptive Catalogue of the
Antique Statues, Paintings and other Productions of the Fine Arts that existed in the
Louvre at the Time the Allies took possession of Paris in July 1815, (Edinburgh, 1816).
Both volumes are helpful in reconstructing which works were included in Napoleon's
museum and their location in the Musee Napoleon. The English guidebook is
particularly valuable as it, with decided partisan enthusiasm, states from which
collections Napoleon appropriated works of art, and when and how the various
sculptures were returned to their original owners.
12Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. II, plate 49.
* 13The three works were placed together in the Hall of Illustrious Men in the Musee
Napoleon, Descriptive Catalogue, pp. 22-3. Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. II,
pp. 69, 70, 77.
14The robed figure to the far left is very close to the statue of Tiberius from the Vatican
Collection. Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. Ill, plate 12.
15The marble relief 6 dm. high is illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. II, plate 68.
16Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. II, plate 3.
17Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. I, plate 4.
lsLes monumens antique, 91; illustrated Vol. II, plate 43.
19These notations occur on pages 4, 15, 42, 67 and 83.
20This inscription was noted by Hayes, Rowlandson Watercolours, p. 62. The comments
by Rowlandson clearly suggest he is familiar with Aeschylus' play, and that he is
copying from an original work of art.
21 Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. IV, plate 16.
22 0n page 71 is a fine drawing of a fountain of sixteenth century or seventeenth century
design which has remained unidentified.
23This group can be found between Daniel and the Libyan Sibyl. In the profile study the
woman's body position is very close to the figure of Jeremiah from the Sistine ceiling.
24Similar groupings can be found on pages 41, 72 and 123. The latter, not illustrated in
these pages, shows the Vatican Hermaphrodite, the Venus de'Medici, and the Bathing
Venuses from the Capitoline and the Louvre.
25Grotesque studies occur on pages 10, 36, 59 and 128. Also, the many pages devoted to
Roman theatrical masks and actors display a fascination with the misshapen (pages 38,
59, 93, 94, 100 and 113). The drawing closest to the bestial studies in Comparative
Anatomy is a drawing entitled "Old Man's Head Placed on Young Shoulders" (p. 94).
26 0n page 53 Rowlandson chooses to identify a figure as Andromache though it is the
Ariadne from the Vatican and he elsewhere identified her properly. The drawing is
accompanied by a long inscription relating Andromache's sad history. Throughout the
V&A album Rowlandson lingers over the stories associated with the Trojan War.
27 0n p. 126 is a drawing of a semi-nude young woman. Rowlandson inscribes that the
drawing is based on a work owned by his patron from Cornwall, Matthew Mitchell. It is
the only work in the V&A album which can be linked to an English collection and to one
of Rowlandson's close associates.
28Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. IV, plate 56.
29It may be that a number of drawings near the end of the V&A album may be derived
from Potter's text. They illustrate "Grecian Warriors" (pages 118, 119, and 121); and
"The Wrestlers" on page 122 may also be dependent upon Potter's lively descriptions.
30Rowlandson throughout his career often made rather free copies of the work of other
artists such as his sketches based on the works of Clodion and Guerin in the
Huntington, the sheet of figures after Boucher, Maratta, and Romano in the Whitworth
Art Gallery, or the drawing with figures based upon Salviati in the Widener Collection,
Harvard University.
31Ronald Paulsen, Rowlandson, A New Interpretation, (London, 1972), p. 82.
32Illustrated in Les monumens antique, Vol. II, plate 50.
74

ARE
WE READY
FOR
SHIH-TAO?
Ju-Hsi Chou

A friend of mine — we learned the technique of traditional painting together
in our youth — once complained that our teacher had started us out on the wrong track.
We should not have begun our training with Shih-t'ao, he maintained, for his style was
much too difficult and elusive for us novices. It would have been better to choose a simpler
model, something perhaps in the vein of the Four Wangs.
Indeed, Tao-chi, who is better known as Shih-t'ao, evoked in our mind then,
just as he does now, a painter of towering stature. At the mention of his name, a novice
invariably would experience a sense of awe. He is the lofty mountain toward which we
stretch our necks in vein to obtain a glimpse of its summit. He is, among the Ch'ing
masters, the painter of painters. The Four Wangs are elegant, polished, and imitative;
but Tao-chi is the original. No one accuses him of ever being a copyist,1 and no one really
knows the sources of his art.2 His style is unique — and moreover, changeful. Novices like
us were unable to find a ready formula by which to apprehend his art. My friend's words
only echo a general sentiment, that initiation into Tao-chi's art should perhaps be
delayed until one is mature. Indeed, there is a mystique about Shih-t'ao possessed by no
other Ch'ing master — not even Shih-ch'i (K'un-ts'an) with whom he is always coupled.
A part of that mystique, of course, lies in the many faces of Shih-t'ao. The
eighteenth century painter, Cheng Hsieh, was already aware of that. Living in the city of
Yang-chou, which our painter chose to be his last domicile, Cheng Hsieh pointed to
Shih-t'ao's many-facedness and realized, by contrast, his own limitation. However, he
liked his own limitation well enough to refuse to trade it for many-facedness. He said:
Shih-t'ao was an eminent painter of many kinds of subjects, bamboo and
epidendrum being his occasional excursions. I, Pan-ch'iao, have been painting none but bamboo and epidendrum for the last fifty years. While he
cultivated a wider field, I specialize; and why should not a specialist be as
good as a generalist? Shih-t'ao's manner of painting was rich in
75

transformations — eccentric and strange, tempered and antique. In addition, he could also paint very fine and elegant works in which everything is
properly arranged. If one compares him with Pa-ta-shan-jen, he would be the
superior artist. However, while the fame of Pa-ta-shan-jen spreads all over
the country; that of Shih-t'ao does not reach beyond Yang-chou. Why is it so?
Pa-ta used only the chien-pi technique ("abbreviated brushstrokes"),
whereas Shih-t'ao's strokes are rarely the same. In addition, Pa-ta does not
have more than one name, thus people can easily remember him. Shih-t'ao's
name is Hung-chi (or Yuan-chi), and he used the following bynames:
Ch'ing-hsiang Tao-jen, K'u-kua Ho-shang, Ta-ti-tzu, Hsia-tsun-che, etc.:
There are just too many of them and they caused much confusion. Pa-ta is but
Pa-ta, and I am but Cheng Pan-ch'iao: I will not be able to follow Master
Shih-t'ao's footsteps.3
The words are whimsical, and the explanation borders on the facetious. No
one however would doubt its truth, for Shih-t'ao's metamorphic personality has caught us
in a snare of unusual dimensions. It is not that we are trying to escape from the snare, but
that we are unable to come to terms with it. My friend's frustration is but a case in point.
Not only to artists, but to art historians also, Shih-t'ao has been a "problem."
Moreover, the great controversy surrounding him is unusual for a painter living as
recently as 300 years ago. True, Fu Pao-shih's exhaustive research has clarified for us the
general, biographical sequence; but much of the material on which his nien-p'u depends
consists of inscriptions from works of uncertain, even dubious, origin.4 Verification is
difficult, and contradictions are a daily staple. Today, although there seems to be a
consensus in favor of 1641 as his birth date5 (instead of 1630, as Fu Pao-shih had
thought), there remain doubts of varying degrees. Other gaps must remain, and are an
encouragement to wide-ranging speculations and shaky conjectures.
It may be significant that Shih-t'ao, somewhat like El Greco in the West,
happens to be a "rediscovered" figure. Cheng Hsieh already hinted at the temporary
lapse of his fame outside Yang-chou in the eighteenth century. In fact, as late as Ch'in
Tsu-yung's (1825-1884) time, there was still mute resistance to his art and to his ideas on
art.6 Somehow, he was not in the orthodox mould and was faulted for it. But the same lack
of orthodoxy, which may be a flaw at one point, could turn into a virtue at another.
Therefore, at a time of change, such as the turn of the twentieth century, when Manchu
rule was on the verge of collapse, the anti-Ch'ing forces could seize upon Shih-t'ao as they
seized upon so many others (Wang Fu-chih, Ku Yen-wu, Huang Tsung-hsi, etc.) as
symbols of their sentiment. Fu Pao-shih, who shared that sentiment, was a case in point.
In Shih-t'ao he found — besides unorthodoxy of style — a patriotic and tragic figure, an
i-min, one in addition with Ming royal blood, who was caught in the storm of historic
events and resigned to the sang ha as a way of protesting intolerable conditions and fate.
Of equal importance as contributors to Shih-t'ao's rising fame are the proCh'ing loyalists, for they too have appropriated him as one of their own. Wen Fong, who
was educated in Shanghai, a milieu where these loyalists were active, describes the
situation in this way:
With the downfall of the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty, in the early decades of this
century, the study of the lives and works of the Ming loyalists of the early
Ch'ing period suddenly became fashionable among a group of scholarly
Ch'ing loyalists. The two best known of the group are Li Jui-ch'ing (or Ch'ing
Tao-jen) and Tseng Hsi... They not only wore their hair long and affected the
life style of the early Ch'ing hermit scholars but, rejecting the rigid orthodox
style of the late Ch'ing painting, cultivated a taste for the bold brush styles of
Tao-chi, Chu Ta, and other early Ch'ing individualist masters.7
In short, the i-min idea could cut both ways!
76

Alas, despite this unmitigated enthusiasm, the image of Shih-t'ao as i-min
was all too fragile. Fu Pao-shih, to his lasting embarrassment, found Shih-t'ao less than
ideal, for the master apparently had succumbed to K'ang-hsi's imperial presence and
power.8 It is an ironic twist of fate that Shih-t'ao should ride on the patriotic and loyalistic
fervors of the twentieth century to preeminence. Whatever the case, it remains true that
Shih-t'ao is a figure born in passion and known with passion. He attracts devotees and
adorers, who often cannot reconcile the myth with the true person.
If Shih-t'ao's i-min status is now tarnished, his art retains its reputation. His
cult was unstoppable, and beyond China and Japan, managed to reach other shores as
well. Contag, Siren, Sickman, and Cahill, one after another, paid their homage.9 From the
late '50's onward, Wen Fong10 and Richard Edwards11 continued the momentum. And
most recently, Marilyn and Shen Fu renewed it and brought it to a high pitch12 Wen Fong
fixed Shih-t'ao's birthdate, Edwards organized a major show, and with the forming of the
Sackler collection, the Fus joined forces and undertook to investigate Shih-t'ao in a more
"historical" fashion, attempting to correct the seemingly lopsided conclusion to which
some art historians are partial — that there are only three genuine Shih-t'aos in existence.13
Unfortunately, every step leads to a counterstep, and every cycle duly repeats
its own pattern. Before the dust is settled, the problem erupts anew. Wen Fong may have
fixed Shih-t'ao's birthdate, but he found that his attribution of the "Letter" by Shih-t'ao
to Pa-ta-shan-jen, on which the birthdate depends, was being openly challenged.14
Richard Edwards presented a major, and certainly unprecedented exhibition of Shih-t'ao,
but also discovered that experts differed markedly in their judgements of individual
paintings.15 Marilyn and Shen Fu may feel that they have clarified the issues and stilled
the waves, but their work has aroused more controversies — as testified by several
reviews of the Sackler exhibition.16 In the last count, it well may be that those who insist
on three authentic Shih-t'aos will continue to do so17; those who prefer an estimate of half
dozen to perhaps a dozen also will not swerve from their course; and those who believe in
the authenticity of numerous Shih-t'aos will be just as convinced as ever of the rightness
of their conviction. A fake to one may be a genuine to another. Meanwhile, the ghost of
Shih-t'ao may be laughing.
One thing is sure: these advocates are deadly earnest. Those who accord
authenticity to three Shih-t'aos could not tolerate the estimate of six to twelve. Those who
favor six to twelve could not with all their good nature accept a larger corpus. And those
who believe in many, many more Shih-t'aos in existence than the numbers noted above
would counter with equal fervency that scholars who opt for the other courses are much
too "rigorous" in their approach.18 They would ask: How could a late master like Shih-t'ao
have so small a surviving corpus? Can it not be that the art historians who reject more
fake Shih-t'aos are also rejecting most of the genuine? Are we not unduly narrowing
Shih-t'ao's style or styles, when he was noted, even by such an authority as Cheng Hsieh,
to have many faces?
The only consensus, and a logical one at that, is: there are fakes and forgeries
in the corpus now attributed to him. As a recent painter — recent, as when compared to,
say, Li Ch'eng or Mi Fei — one suspects, or even expects, that a fair number of his
paintings should have survived to the present time.19 Yet, as a result of the cult developed
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, fakes and forgeries have trailed his

fame. Since fakes and forgeries are produced in proportion to the fame of a given
artist — the profit motive is nowhere more apparent — in the case of Shih-t'ao, the
fakers literally had a field day. According to the most "rigorous" connoisseur, the
percentage of fakes in Shih-t'ao's case reaches an astronomical 99%. Even for the relaxed
Shih-t'ao scholars, the estimate would not likely drop below 70%, an astounding figure,
which perhaps is beyond compare for a Ch'ing artist.
These pseudo-statistics need not be taken too seriously, though they belie the
77

confusion in Shih-t'ao scholarship. And no one, or practically no one, because of the
preponderance of fakes, agrees on the nature of Shih-t'ao's corpus and artistic personality. This is particularly so when one observes that an effect of fakes is to fracture the
original into many more Shih-t'aos, with fakers' hands and traits added to complicate and
enlarge the range. By comparison, his own myriad expressions, as noted by Cheng Hsieh,
might appear timid, lost, so to speak, in the sea of mirages. To transpose a line from Jesus
Christ, Superstar, we might ask the question:
Hsia-tsun-che, Superstar,
Do you think you are
what they say you are?
Moreover, fakes — or awareness of them — create an atmosphere of suspicion. In consequence, not only the fakes themselves, but also the originals are burdened with the
same aura of doubt. As is well known in the detective genre, when the culprit is not yet
caught even the innocent bystanders are suspect.
To make matters worse still, Shih-t'ao's fakers are not always third-rate or
fourth-rate painters. Yes, there are such, but on the other hand no less an artist than
Chang Ta-ch'ien has been suspected to be among them. Should that be true, then Chang's
impersonation, buttressed by his mastery of a vast range of brush strokes, pictorial
schemata, and atmospheric effects, perhaps plays as much a role in formulating our
"image" of Shih-t'ao, as do Shih-t'ao's works themselves. In the aftermath, if negative
judgements against poor and ill-conceived copies or pastiches are still permissible, a
positive identification of Shih-t'ao's hand through qualitative evidence is no longer so
easily assured. Besides, methodologically speaking, we do not yet know Shih-t'ao's hand
if we do not know which are the originals and which are the fakes.
To pursue the detective simile further, the key problem in Chinese painting in
general and Shih-t'ao in particular, is to expose the culprit and exonerate the innocent.
And this cannot be done on documentary groundsl The production of fakes, on a scale as
large as described above, has destroyed the value of documentation precisely because it
appeals to the same set of documents.20 That is to say, if we try to use an entry in a
Ch'ien-lung catalogue of paintings to authenticate a given work, the faker too may have
resorted to the same entry as a departing point for his post-Ch'ien-lung faking. (In
addition, there is also a chance that the very entry itself may well have been culled from a
spurious work, which weakens the case for a documentary approach still further.) At
best, the documentary approach perhaps can contribute negatively, but not positively, in
matters of authentication. The chief basis for connoisseurship, mutatis mutandis, must
be a pictorial approach with perception of forms and styles as its key method. There, the
quicksand of subjective judgement invariably enters into play, resulting, as our pseudostatistics have shown above, in the marked discrepancy of opinions.
It is in this connection that I raise the title question: are we really ready for
Shih-t'ao? Like my painter-friend, are we not going into a complex problem without first
being initiated into the simpler ones? How can we deal with the multiplicity of styles and
at the same time the multiplicity of forgeries in Shih-t'ao's corpus? Can we really
confidently set forth examples of Shih-t'ao from the existing corpus, assert that they are
genuine, and then peel off the fakes which do not agree with the chosen few? Once again,
as in the practice of painting, the Four Wangs may be a simpler area to probe: their works
are found in the Palace Museum, some with an eighteenth century terminus ante quem to
guide the connoisseur, and at least one of them, Wang Yiian-ch'i, is represented by works
of K'ang-hsi provenance, painted, apparently, for the imperial pleasure.21
In 1958, in his article on Shih-t'ao, which is described by Shen and Marilyn Fu
as "definitive," Wen Fong set forth a series of paintings which to him represented the
genuine works of Shih-t'ao. There were more than ten examples on the list, including the
album of Huang-shan sceneries (ca, 1670's), the Huang-shan handscroll (1699), and the
78

Lu-shan scroll, paintings which hold the highest consensus rate among art historians.22
Why these are genuine — or possibly genuine — the explanations leave unclear.
The Michigan exhibition encompassed many more examples. Once again,
though the authors must have been conscious of fakes — one can be certain that the
paintings there were selected with scrupulous care — there was little attempt to deal
with them.
Studies in Connoisseurship, however, proposes a set of criteria and standards.
Admitting that Max Loehr hit the bull's-eye when he declared several years ago that, "it
is not posssible to prove authenticity,"23 given the paucity of "true documentation" in
Chinese painting and the enormous burden which the fakes have imposed on the
genuine, Shen and Marilyn Fu nonetheless embarked on a course intended to do the very
opposite. In this case, the authors did outline — courageously to be sure — their modus
operandi, a mixture of connoisseurship East and West. Concerning the process of authentication, they wrote:24
When faced with the authentication of a single work attributed to a given
master, we are in essence confronted with assessing the whole body of his
attributed works. None of us starts from scratch in this endeavor. Traditional
attributions are seldom disregarded with profit, for they may offer insight
into some aspect of the history of the painting, and our researches and
subsequent confirmation or revision of traditional views in turn will corroborate previous research and build up the corpus of known works of the master.
In seeking "authenticity" we are seeking the individual artistic personality
at the core of each of these works, particularly those of the later (postfourteenth century) period in Chinese painting, when the individual artistic
personality was strikingly manifest. Our notion of artistic individuality in
this context is based on two assumptions formulated by connoisseurs of
Western art: that "perfect identity of (stylistic) characteristics indicates
identity of origin" and that "the divergence between works of the (master's)
youth and maturity, even though it might be considerable, cannot be as great
as that between his own and another master's works." These hypotheses are
equally valid in the study of Chinese painting.
As noted above, from the Yuan dynasty on, extant paintings attributed to a
given master are of sufficient homogeneity and number for us to assemble a
credible corpus. We are not confronted with scores of anonymous or unsigned
works whose author's names are lost to history, nor need we investigate a
ghost figure or search for his long-deceased masterpieces, as one must do for
the majority of Sung and pre-Sung names found in the literary records. For
paintings attributed to the Sung and earlier, whether anonymous or attributed, it is the determination of period and date of execution which is crucial,
with individual authorship or school tradition less so; for a large number of
Yuan and post-Yiian attributions, both period and personal style count,
as well as the individual "hand" of the master.
With the corpus of paintings of a given master thus lined up, morphological
and qualitative observations, as well as those of physical conditions, then could follow
suit, leading to the distribution of those works into a five-group scheme. This distributory
process is described by the authors as "organic," meaning that it is not fixed, but fluid and
subject to modifications. The five groups are:
I. Genuine works of quality, with "typical" or "mature" characteristics of
the master.
II. Genuine works displaying characteristics associated with "early" and
"late" styles of the master.
79

III. Genuine works of mediocre quality and those with characteristics "untypical" of the master.
IV. Imitations, copies, and forgeries of pre-modern vintage.
V. Imitations, copies, and forgeries of recent origin.
The above attempt is laudable. It was, in all respects, a conscientious effort, a
soul-searching for solutions where none seemed to exist. The authors were trying to
reverse the claim of Max Loehr, who, in working with pre-Yuan paintings, dispensed
with any effort in proving authenticity: he was content with "compatibility, consistency,
and logicality" of style, ignoring that the compatibility, consistency, and logicality could
well be his, rather than those of the paintings. Here, of course, the period is not pre-Yuan,
but Ch'ing; and the Fus perhaps felt that authenticity could be proven. They not only are
well versed in western methodology and its application, but also are aware of its difficulties; for in spite of the fivefold grouping, in actuality one must deal not with clear-cut
categories, but nuances, not broad generalizations, but hair-splitting decisions. The two
assumptions in the West, namely, 1) identity of style signifies identity of authorship, and
2) style differs less among works by the same artist than among works by different
artists, can only be accepted with enormous qualification and often can only be exercised
in a milieu relatively free from copies, fakes, or pastiches. The presence of these copies,
fakes, and pastiches in Chinese painting has made the task of the connoisseur infinitely
more difficult and painful, particularly when he is not aided by works of known provenance. Under such circumstances, morphological analysis could not but be guess
work — at best educated guess work. Worse still, it could become a "closed" system, in
which the connoisseur's own sensibility, even in a sincere effort at discrimination,
becomes the final judge, without any external guides or criteria to pin-point the flaws.
This is the case with the aforementioned fivefold grouping, which, "organic"
or not, is a closed system. Even though there is no a priori determination, the system
tends to forsake external guides or criteria, and dictates in effect an internal "consistency, logicality, and compatibility" as a way of problem-solving. It is Loehr all over
again.
To reach this verdict, one only need ask: how do the Fus go about distributing
Shih-t'ao's works among five groups? The answer is: we do not know. For, in spite of the
impressive scholarship that underlies their case studies and individual entries in the
Sackler catalogue, there is not a single instance in which the actual process of reasoning
and discrimination is outlined and the criteria given. We are instead presented with their
conclusions — incontrovertible, absolute, and final.
To be fair, we should be willing to concede that since, as the Fus have
contended, the distributory process involves the whole corpus, rather than any one work,
the presentation of actual processes not only would be lengthy beyond conception, but
tedious as well. Still, should we not have the right to expect a few concrete guidelines, say,
either period or personal style, so that at least we could infer what has transpired in the
authors' minds when they say this is not genuine, and that is?
In the absence of these guidelines, we must face the possibility that the

authors arrive at their conclusions solely on the strength of internal comparison, and
that it is their sensibility which selects the authentic and determines the spurious, a
process which they call, after Panofsky, "intuitive esthetic recreation."25 They know
which painting should fall into the first group, which should fall into the second group,
and so on. In the meantime, even the difficult and challenging Group III should not be so
difficult and challenging as to be beyond solution. The last two groups are formed as a
matter of course, as one painting after another falls into the columns — all according to
the connoisseur's intuitive-esthetic-recreative ability.26
Yet suppose we should happen to differ from their viewpoint as regards
attribution? Suppose we should consider as fake what they have regarded as genuine?
80

Could we then conduct a useful debate or discussion? Apparently not. Indeed, it seems
that Marilyn and Shen Fu, in spite of their elaborate theoretical structure, are not
operating so differently from those who are without this structure and who allow their
intuitive-aesthetic-recreative ability to flow unchecked.
It is in this sense that this paper asks: are we ready for Shih-t'ao? Or for that
matter, are we ready for any of the major painters in China? Have we done the fundamental work upon which to base the examination of an artist's career, development, maturation, etc.? Can we tackle Shih-t'ao on the basis of the given corpus alone or should we
expand our focus? Moreover, where can we find common ground for scholarly discussion,
meaningful debate, and useful exchange?
At this point, it may be stated that we, the art historians, are each on
individual tracks. Those who accept only three Shih-t'ao's, and those who reject that
opinion, achieve validity only in their own eyes. So long as their criteria remain intuitive
and unspoken, the matter is essentially esoteric. And esotericism defies openness,
creates its own mystique, and clearly has no business in a scholarly world.
In short, as esoterics, we are not ready for Shih-t'ao yet. We will be ready for
Shih-t'ao, or for any other major artist only when we open up these closed systems, accept
certain principles and guidelines, and undertake the "intuitive-esthetic-recreation"
under their auspices. This includes a willingness to take into consideration more and
more works of the same period — and even those of later periods. We must at least
reconsider the role of period or regional style in the authentication process, regardless of
whether we are dealing with pre-Yuan or post-Yuan artists. That is to say, in order to
ascertain the genuine and the spurious in Shih-t'ao, let us momentarily forsake his
corpus as a basis, and instead take into consideration other paintings of the seventeenth
century — especially those with reliable documentation — and proceed to account for
that stylistic consistency which marks either the period, the locale, or the school. When
the focus is so broadened, these perceived common traits and generic patterns then could
act as a useful touchstone against which intuitive-esthetic-recreation can be made
possible.
Art historians of pre-Yuan painting often complain of the lack of suitable data
whereon to anchor their ideas. Of the archaeological finds pertaining to Sung painting
for instance, the Ch'ing-ling, Karakhoto fragments, and frescoes in Feng Tao-chen's
tomb are germane. More recently, a Ming princely tomb at Shangtung, namely that of
Chu T'an, also yielded a Sung fan and a Ch'ien Hsiian.27 Aside from these, and perhaps a
few paintings in the Japanese collections which came to the island prior to the fourteenth
century, "documented" (i.e., truly documented) works are few and far in between. On the
other hand, art historians of post-Yuan periods are blessed with numerous works in the
Palace Museums, but choose to ignore them and their historical value, despite the fact
that many of them possess a terminus ante quern of the 9th year of Ch'ien-lung, and some
even earlier.
On the basis of the Ch'ing-ling wall paintings, Karakhoto fragments, or Feng
Tao-chen frescoes — all of which are works of minor stature — the connoisseur's ability to
ascertain the authenticity of Sung paintings is extremely limited. He can not, for
example, despite their strengths, prove either Fan K'uan's "Travellers in the Mountains
and Ravines" or Kuo Hsi's "Early Spring" to be genuine. On the other hand, the reliability of Ch'ing paintings in the imperial collection as historical data is often guaranteed by

imperial seals and more particularly, by the date of entry into the three series of
Shih-ch'ii Pao-chi .28 The general refusal to use this broad spectrum of documented works
in the imperial collection, regardless of its partiality toward the orthodox school and the
like, can only be described as foolhardy. Methodologically, this results in the loss of a
valuable foundation — rejected in favor of the false certainty, or perhaps the simplicity,
of a closed system.
The corpus of Shih-t'ao's works, whether originals or imitations, can yield a
81

"manner" of Shih-t'ao. To affirm authenticity, however, we need more than a "consistency" of traits. The forger's hand sometimes can be more consistent, and appear more
"genuine" than the genuine itself: to wit, Emperor Ch'ien-lung's preference for the
Tzu-ming version ofFu-ch'un Shan-chii fu % ^ fc-fc over the Wu-yung version.29 In
the same way, the Huang-shan album itself must be regarded as "potential," not "actual"
Shih-t'ao, and cannot guarantee the authenticity of Plate XVII in Studies in Connoisseurs hip as a Shih-t'ao. Only through the awareness that the Huang-shan album appears
to share a synchronic temperament with works of similar periods, could we begin to
"improve" if not "prove" its authenticity and thus, its value as a work by the painter. This
is possible only when the Ch'ing paintings in the Ku-kung collection are exhaustively
studied and their periodization firmly grasped.
Earlier, I hinted that the initial problem in Chinese painting consists not so
much in the identification of the genuine as in the exposure of fakes. To do so, careful
observation of the artistic, material, and stylistic facets of a given painting is essential. In
some works the artistic aspect alone is revealing — a much too even and homogeneous
treatment of the whole (likely a tracing copy); a paradoxical contrast between strong
composition and weak brushstrokes (definitely a copy); or a simple misunderstanding of
the original, including what Gombrich calls "pathology" in representation.30 Materials —
their appearance, their quality, their age, or when ascertainable, their chemical components — can also be quite informative. In works like long handscrolls and albums, where
doctoring by antique dealers is not uncommon, a still more thorough examination must
be attempted. As mentioned above, documents too are useful in a negative way. Finally,
those works which reveal later stylistic traits can be filtered out. This process of elimination through style requires a better understanding of the post-Shih-t'ao development as
well as that during Shih-t'ao's lifetime than generally is appreciated.
Moreover, with the emphasis now changed to the elimination of fakes, we may
be able — if such opportunities ever exist — to identify fakes through known fakes.
Chang Ta-ch'ien's imitation of Shih-t'ao, if found, could be used to pinpoint other Chang
Ta-chi'ien impersonations.31 In consequence, we perhaps could gain a better understanding of the nature of forgeries and forgers, whether whimsical or mercenary, important or
peripheral, derivative or imaginary.
In this way, we peel off layer after layer of the encrustation which has grown
around and concealed the few extant originals. The ideal goal, of course, is to eliminate
all such fakes and forgeries so that the authentic works will be restored to their rightful,
pristine position.
Going beyond this negative approach, we can also utilize the authenticated
works of generations of followers — and disciples of course — to frame and delineate their
master's style. By studying and examining the works of these painters, we can lay seige
to their sources, to their fountainhead — both stylistically and qualitatively.
Which goes to say that the priority of connoisseurship, and that of Chinese
painting in particular, lies in a reversal of the present situation wherein scholars tend to
move — in historical order — from early to late, ancient to modern. It is not that they are
wrong. Methodologically speaking, however, there is no way to define a Sung style
without at the same time being knowledgeable about those of the Yuan, Ming, and
Ch'ing. To proceed otherwise, that is, to dwell on Sung only, would be a form of selfdeception. And overall, it is the Ch'ing painting which, in terms of quantity and quality of
data, surpasses all other dynastic periods. Similarly, from the viewpoint of Shih-t'ao
scholarship, it is best not to dwell on him exclusively, but to take advantage of his
followers and disciples. One should edge "backward" toward Shih-t'ao, and not "forward"
and away from him.32
This, of course, is not to ignore the historical nature of art. To proceed
backward does not mean that a historian of art should forsake the question of lineages,
influences, or derivations: it only signals a methodic approach, not a historical reversal.
82

And this methodological concept must presume an incipient knowledge of such lineages,
influences, or derivations to be operative.
Meanwhile, it may be said that, notwithstanding the prevalence of imitations,
fakes, and pastiches in Chinese painting, there remains a historical order of things which
even their cumulative effect cannot undermine, that is, a gradual progression in time in a
pyramidal and multi-serial vein. Within this temporal pyramid, each series is headed by
a master whose originality and vision helped to found it. Imitations, fakes, and pastiches
only extend the series, or perhaps confuse it by serial exchanges and permutations, but
they cannot alter the series. They proceed a posteriori, after the fact.
To be sure, insofar as a given series is concerned, we will not often be able to
find the "original" works. Speaking in a broader context, however, the history of Chinese
painting, like other histories of art, consists of multiplying, evolutionary series, the
beginnings of which are well defined. Compared with others, however, in Chinese
painting the ends stretch longer through artificial means of perpetuation. The individual
masters do exist; they define that beginning. As a result, one of the most fruitful ways to
approach Chinese painting in general and Shih-t'ao in particular, is to lay a solid
foundation in the pyramid of each series, and subsequently work to isolate and reveal its
tip. The foundation, as a rule, is easier to tackle since it involves school pieces, works of
followers, and those of minor artists who tend to flock around the master. Moreover,
owing to the declining profit margin, these followers and minor artists were seldom faked
on a scale comparable to those well-known figures. Vis-a-vis the stale imitations of great
masters, it is these works that often exhibit a fresh air, a breath of spring, through which
we perhaps could obtain a glimpse of their progenitor.
So we delineate a perimeter around the master and build up a corpus of works
that are likely to be his. Even then, there is no absolute certitude that all of these chosen
works will be genuine. For the purpose of further elimination and refinement, "compatibility, logicality, and consistency" of style and hand may lend some help, while allowing
for a degree of flexibility and variability natural to an individual's growth cycle and
potential. In the aftermath, even though there still may be uncertainties or marginal
fluctuations, the result bespeaks responsible history, based not on one's arbitrary choice
of a given set of works, but on comparative study, reliable deduction and controlled
analysis. Where controversies exist, they would be confined to those areas where insufficient documents are the cause, and would not extend to the whole field of Chinese
painting — as is now the case.
It is this that prompted me to write the article: that the Sackler Collection,
which boasts a number of Shih-t'aos presumably as rich as anywhere, could show his
paintings to be of such poor quality. Having seen them, my mind boggles. Are these really
Shih-t'aos? If they are, I might say that he does not deserve the high place that art history
has accorded him. If they are not, then the question is: did the collector, as well as the
authors of the catalogue, err in selecting them? How indeed does the Sackler Shih-t'ao
pale in comparison to a Lan Ying, to a Kung Hsien, or even to a minor artist like Fan Ch'i
in the same collection!
For my part, I cannot believe that all these are really Shih-t'aos. Omitting the
youthful works in the collection, most of the so-called mature paintings still are weak in
hand, pan
and chieh ^
in brush work, and dull in ink washes. If these are
indeed Shih-t'aos, if these works are really by the same artist as are the album and
handscroll of Huang-shan and the painting of Lu-shan — which are in accordance with
my concept of seventeenth century style — then these latter three must be exceptions
rather than the rule.
An objection can be raised to my argument: that these "poor works" are but
the expression of cho
, or "awkwardness." Yet cho, which is founded on skill and
transcends it, is no child's play; whereas the Sackler Shih-t'aos appear to be almost that.
83

With the exception of certain leaves, one may relegate the paintings to the status of
dubious works of mediocre quality. If these works are indeed from the hand of Shih-t'ao,
the only justification for his prominence as a painter would be his fame as a loyalist. But
even that was ephemereal, as Fu Pao-shih found out in regard to his submission to the
Ch'ing emperor.
My mind however refuses to go on from there. It would be sheer intellectual
arrogance to imply that men like Cheng Hsieh, Ch'ing Tao-jen, Tseng Hsi, etc., were not
cognizant of quality, that they were swayed by their fondness for Shih-t'ao's personality
traits. The only conclusion that I can formulate, then, is that the Sackler Shih-t'aos are
not what Marilyn and Shen Fu call Group I works (genuine, high quality, and typical),
but must be either the "untypical" and poor specimens of Group III, or the fakes and
imitations of Groups IV and V. When coming to this, my mind rests assured. At least, by
discarding these, we can resuscitate and restore Shih-t'ao's place in Chinese art history.

Appendix
Having dealt with the Shih-t'aos in the Sackler collection en masse, it is
necessary to reverse the procedure and undertake a case-by-case study. Simple fairness
would demand that this be done, or else it would appear that the Sackler Shih-t'aos are
being dismissed in a wholesale fashion. For want of space, we will consider only seven
major cases. In each case we will examine pertinent evidence and raise questions
regarding authenticity. For the sake of convenience, the citations below refer to Studies
in Connoisseurship.
CASE I. Pis. XVIII and XIX, Searching for Plum Blossoms: Poems and Painting.
Even though PL XIX and fig. 1 (pp. 180-181) are inferior to PL XVIII on textual and even
pictorial ground (the Fu's enumerated the mistranscriptions occurring in these two
works), it does not follow that Pl. XVIII must therefore be the "original." The confusion in
the plum branches, particularly in the fore and aft relationship which a genuine work
usually sidesteps with ease, is less than reassuring. In addition, the "flat-top" mound
toward the left-hand side of the scroll appears to have been done after the inscription. It
has, one may wish to say, a "squeezed-in" look. The other versions wisely avoid the
mistake.
To conclude, it seems likely that there was a prototype for Pl. XVIII. In the
process of making the copy, the copyist was so preoccupied by the length of the inscriptions and the need for textual accuracy that the painting itself became secondary. Thus,
he chose to write the inscription first and then had to readjust the form of the mound in
order that it would fit into whatever space that was left.
CASE II. Pis. XX and XXI, Flowers and Figures. The qualitative difference between
the "original" (Pl. XX) and the copy by Li Jui-ch'i (Pl. XXI) is, to put it bluntly, minimal.
Li's version, if not so inscribed, could just as easily be taken as the original. This raises
the question whether Pl. XX is indeed the original as the Fu's have claimed. To approach
the matter in a cynical way, couldn't it be that the "copy" was done for the purpose of
"supporting" an "original" which was not the original at all?33
On the positive side, this work (Pl. XX) does share several colophon writers
with the album of 12 scenes of Huang-shan, formerly in the Sumitomo Collection. They
are: Li Kuo-sung, Huang Po-shan and Wu Shu-kung. Seals of identical designs and a
consistency in Li Kuo-sung's calligraphic style can be observed across both albums. One
comes away with the feeling that Pl. XX, even if less than genuine, does have a history
behind it. It cannot be a total concoction by an ingenious forger.
On the negative side, however, the calligraphies of both Huang Po-shan and
Wu Shu-kung display notable difference from one album to the other. We hasten to add
84

that it is not so much differences in style — since Wu Shu-kung, in three colophons in the
Huang-shan album, reveals a tendency for changing style, from Su to Mi to yet another.
It is instead, to use an expression that has recently come into currency among Chinese art
historians, the change in the "energy level" of these writings, a matter of brush control
and ink quality. The inscription by both writers in the Huang-shan album invariably
harbour a deep resonance and a rich, almost tactile flavor that are derived in part from
ts'ang-feng ("concealed brush tip") and in part from a dexterous manipulation of ink tone.
These qualities are lost in the corresponding inscriptions in the Flowers and Figures —
considered by the Fus to closely parallel the Huang-shan album34 — as brush stroke turns
sharp and flippant and ink no less so. If indeed it is the Fus contention that both albums
and their inscriptions are to be dated around 1695, then this change in "energy level"
would be rather perplexing.35
It should be stated that neither the Fus nor this author have ever seen the
Huang-shan album. Working from the inferior reproductions from the Shina Nanga
Taisei (Suppl. Vol. I, Pis. 158-69), it is indeed difficult to arrive at a supportable conclusion. Perhaps it would be best for us to wait until the album turns up before we finalize
our judgement.
CASE III. PI. XXII, Landscapes, Vegetables, and Flowers.36 The condition of this
album is remarkably new and its quality is of dubious nature. To be sure, this alone is not
sufficient ground for its dismissal from Shih-t'ao's corpus. However, if the dating is
believed to be ca. 1697 on the strength of the inscription on Leaf L, when Shih-t'ao would
have settled in Yang-chou, then it would be highly incongruous for him to have signed
Leaf H with the statement that "Shih-t'ao wrote 'Under the Branch.'" "Under the
Branch" is an illusion to I-chih-ko - iL fg\ (Pavilion of One Branch), which would be
appropriate only if the master residing in Nanking, that is, in the 1680's. What is the
conclusion? A possible forgery.
CASE IV. PI. XXV, Album of Flowers and Portrait of Tao-chi. If, in the course of
examining this album, one finds: a) Leaf B is of a different sort of paper than the rest and
therefore initially did not belong there, and b) the so-called "self-portrait" appended at
the end is of extremely poor quality and, as suggested by the Fus, could not have been
earlier than late nineteenth or early twentieth century, skepticism would be a normal
reaction. Particularly irritating are the inscriptions found on the "self-portrait," which,
judging by the calligraphic style, are purportedly by Shih-t'ao himself, but in content,
defy all logic. For the date given there is 1674, but the wording in the first inscription
roughly parallels that of Chang Keng's biography of our master, which was not published
until 1739.
CASE V. PI. XXVI, Album of Landscapes. There is a curious statement on p. 244,
Studies in Connoisseurship, which the Fus perhaps should explain: "Initially we were
cautious about the authenticity of these leaves, but careful study of both paintings and
calligraphy reveals the album to be a genuine and revealing expression of the artist
during a period of illness and the onset of old age (Tao-chi was sixty in 1701)." Why were
there doubts about the authenticity of this album in the first place? How did the authors
resolve their doubts? Is it really plausible to use illness and the onset of old age to explain
away an infirm hand?
CASE VI. PI. XXXII, Shih-t'ao and Chiang Chi, Landscape and Portrait of Hueng
Cheng-chih. Of the Sackler's Shih-t'aos, I accept this painting on the strength of Chiang
Shih-chih's inscription, which is appended to the scroll. Chiang's inscription is remarkably close in style and in "energy level" to that on his own painting in the Freer Gallery
collection (fig. 3, p. 291; fig. 4, 292). Chiang's dates (1647-1709), his friendship with
Shih-t'ao, and particularly, his minor stature, which allowed his paintings to escape from
the fate of being excessively forged, are among the factors which directly or indirectly
contribute toward a favorable appraisal of this handscroll, Landscape and Portrait of
Hung Cheng-chih.
85

CASE VII. PL XXIV, Reminiscences of Nanking. Same sort of conflict as in Case III
is a cause for concern here. Leaf A is signed with the sobriquet, Ta-ti-tzu, i.e., Shih-t'ao of
the Yang-chou period; its allusion to I-chih, on the other hand, suggests his Nanking
phase.37 Leaf B contains the same contradiction. The only mitigating factor is the traditional association of this album with Nanking sceneries.
It remains to be said that authentication is but one aspect of art history. It is
true that, once determined to be authentic, the historical value of a painting increases.
Conversely, being denied authenticity will diminish its historical value. This does not
mean that such work is no longer useful, but that its "utility" would at best be partial,
rather than whole. When such works are put to use, extra caution may be necessary so
that the art historian would not mistake as original features those elements which bear
the specific mark of the forger. Regardless, it would be sheer folly to simply cast the fakes
overboard. When the original no longer exists, it is the fake or copy that will help us to fill
the gap. This applies to a number of the Sackler Shih-t'aos under consideration.

FOOTNOTES
1 Unlike

his contemporaries, Shih-t'ao almost never indulged in the cult of fang
. He
did, however, make copies of ancient paintings, an instance of which can be seen in
Ta-ti-tzu T'i-hua Shih-pa
i^'M^M & Ht &L
, ch. 3, pp. 71ff. Ta-ti-tzu
T'i-hua Shih-pa is included in Yang Chia-lo
&
ed., I-shu Ts'ung-pien
(Taipei, 1968).
2In order to know the sources of his art, we must know the styles of his early works, none
of which, it is safe to say, have survived.
3Cheng Hsieh, Pan-ch'iao T'i-hua Ht
M & , (I-shu Ts'ung-pien), p. 141.
4Fu Pao-shih
\% ft T* , Shih-t'ao Shang-jen Nien-p'u g -fe t
^
(Shanghai, 1948).
^For 1641 as Shih-t'ao's birth date, see Wen Fong, "A Letter from Shih-t'ao to Pa-ta
Shan-jen and the Problem of Shih-t'ao's Chronology,"
Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, Vol. XIII (1959), pp. 22-53.
6See Ch'in Tsu-yung's preface to hisHua-hsiieh Hsin-yin
fa $ . o - ( 1 8 7 8 ) , li-yen
-t
, p. 2b, where he regards Shih-t'ao as outside of the orthodox school and
therefore decides to exclude his treaties, the Hua-yii-lu
^
, from his
anthology of Chinese painting theories.
7Preface to Marilyn and Shen Fu's Studies in Connoisseurship (Princeton, 1973),
p. xiv.
8This occurred on two occasions, in 1684 and 1689. Also see Shih-t'ao Shang-jen
Nien-p'u, p. 21, item 6.
9Victoria Contag,DieBeiden Steine (Braunschweig, 1950) andZwei Meister Chinescher
Landschafts malerei: Shih-t'ao und Shih-ch'i (Baden-Baden, 1955); Osvald Siren,
"Shih-t'ao, Painter, Poet, and Theoretician," Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern
Antiquities, no. 12 (1949), pp. 31-62; Laurence Sickman and Alexander Soper, The Art
and Architecture of China (Baltimore, 1956); and James Cahill, Chinese Painting
(Skira, 1960).
10See Wen Fong, "A Letter from Shih-t'ao..
nI

refer to the exhibition which Richard Edwards organized in Ann Arbor, 1967, and the

catalogue thereof, The Painting of Tao-chi.
12This occasioned the exhibition of the Sackler collection of Chinese paintings in
Princeton, 1973 for which Studies in Connoisseurship was written.
13One of the beneficial effects of all of this attention is that, even though Shih-t'ao has not
become a household word in the West, he has clearly emerged as a key figure in the
annals of world art.
14See Alexander Soper, "The 'Letter from Shih-t'ao to Pa-ta-shen-jen,'" Artihus Asiae,
Vol. XXIX, 2/3 (1967), pp. 267ff; and Hsu Fu-kuan,
Shih-t'ao Chih-i Yen-chiu
fc # i. &
(Taipei, 1968), pp. 85-92.
15These opinions were aired in the informal symposium held at the University of
Michigan Art Museum, at which this author was a participant.
86

,6See

two reviews by Jennifer Byrd in Oriental Art, New Series Vol. XX, no. 2 (Summer
1974), pp. 219-224; and Vol. XX, no. 4 (Winter 1974), pp. 436-448. Also of interest is
Susan Bush's notice in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. XXXIV (1974),
pp. 299ff. On the whole, these reviews are favorably inclined; but questions about
authenticity and methodology invariably rise to sharpen the areas of disagreement.
17A11 three are in the Sumitomo collection, namely, 1) album of eight leaves, depicting
eight scenes of Huang-shan; 2) scroll of Huang-shan, dated 1699; and 3) hanging scroll,
"View of Mt. Lu." Thus far no one has expressed doubt about them.
,8Cahill's letter to the author.
,9This is an assumption held by most scholars of Chinese painting, though it may not
always dovetail to the actual situation. In other words, this assumption will still need to
be confirmed.
20For this, see Wen Fong, "The Problem of Forgeries in Chinese Painting," rArtibus
Asiae, Vol. XXV, 2/3 (1962), pp. 95ff.
21 For Wang Yiian-ch'i's works in the Palace Museum, see Ku-kung Shu-hua-lu
it i
(Taipei, 1965), Vol. Ill, pp. 538-548.
22"A Letter from Shih-t'ao...," pp. 47-48, Appendix III.
23Max Loehr's article, "Some Fundamental Issues in the History of Chinese Painting,"
appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1964),
pp. 185ff.
24Studies in Connoisseurship, pp. 23ff.
25Ibid., p. 18.
26 0n the other hand, it may be argued that, using this distributory system of the five
groups, one can neither prove the non-existence of Li Ch'engs in pre-Yuan painting nor
the existence of genuine Shih-t'aos in post-Yuan periods.
27For a convenient illustration of these paintings, see figs. 4, 5, and 6 in Wen Fong,
"Toward a Structural Analysis of Chinese Landscape Painting," Art Journal, Vol.
XXVII, no. 4 (Summer 1969), pp. 388ff. Paintings unearthed from Chu T'an's tomb are
reproduced on pp. 133-135 in Wen-hua Ta-ke-ming Ch'i-chien CKu-t'u Wen-wu
pfl Jfci
, Vol. I (Peking, 1972).
28The three series of Shih-chu Pao-chi are dated 1745, 1793, and 1816.
29Also see recent issue of Ming-pao
^HL , nos. 107,109-113, for articles dealing with
"Fu-ch'un Shan chu t'u."
30E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Washington, 1960), particularly chii V, "Formula and
Experience," pp. 146ff.
31 See Fu Shen, "T'an Chien-pieh — pu-chih-wei ho i chih chen
- * ^\h
<tf
Ming-pao, Vol. X, no. 2 (February 1975), pp. 53ff.
32This of course is not to say that connoisseurs must proceed always in the same vein. The
point is that, whether this is authentication at a glance or the result of much study,
there must be "correctives" to test and validate the conclusion.
"For an illuminating analysis of this practice, see Wen Fong, "The Problem of Forgery in
Chinese Painting."
34E.G., Huang Po-shan, Pis. XX-AA and XX-EE versus fig. 2, p. 187; Wu Shu-kung, PL
XX-CC versus fig. 3, p. 196 and PL SS-HH versus fig. 7, p. 201.
35 Viewed against this backdrop, even the similarity of Li Kuo-sung's calligraphy in the
two albums could very well be illusory rather than real. Li is hardly an accomplished
calligrapher and his style can be easily imitated.
36See also Wen Fong and Marilyn Fu, The Wilderness Colors of Tao-chi (Greenwich,
Connecticut, 1973).
37Richard Vinograd, in a recent article, "Reminiscences of Ch'in-huai: Tao-chi and the
Nanking School," Archives of Asian Art, Vol. XXXI (1978), p. 6, admits that Ta-ti as a
sobriquet of Tao-chi appears most frequently on paintings after 1697, when he built the
Ta-ti Ts'ao-t'ang in Yang-chou. However, he also insists that there are exceptions to
this rule. In n. 3, p. 30, he proceeds to name three exceptions. Of these, one is clearly
unacceptable even to himself. Two others are dated in the years of 1662 and 1674. To
this author, the time gap between these paintings and the building of Ta-ti Ts'ao-t'ang
automatically makes them suspect, particularly since there is no evidence for the usage
of this sobriquet in the intervening phase, namely the 1680s.
87

A
CONVERSATION
BETWEEN
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB
AND
JACK BRECKENRIDGE
transcribed by Jack Breckenridge
(In the spring of1973 while on a vacation in Phoenix, Adolph Gottlieb agreed to
speak to the art students at Arizona State University. At his request the presentation took
the form of a conversation with me concerning the general topic "The Shift of the Art
Capital From Paris to New York in the 1940s." He also volunteered to answer questions
from the audience. Some of these questions were submitted in advance in writing and some
were asked from the floor in the course of the evening.
Gottlieb was confined to a wheel chair at this time with the left side of his body
incapacitated and his speech was somewhat slowed. However, his mind was very quick
and his sallies in answer to questions often brought forth quick laughter and applause
from the nearly three hundred people in the audience.
The following pages contain substantial excerpts from the almost two hours of
taped discussion and questions and answers of that evening. The evening began with a
slide presentation of about fifty of Gottlieb's paintings. They were projected in chronological order on a large screen on the stage above the seated Gottlieb. The original plan was to
show the slides without comment because Gottlieb had specifically asked to make no
comments on the individual works. As he watched them flash on the screen, however, he
was moved to begin his remarks by making a general observation about a change that took
place in his work in the early 1950s. To illustrate this change I have included two
illustrations. One shows the "all-over" manner to which he alluded in his opening remarks. The other painting is in his late manner and has special relevance to this conversation because it was painted during his stay in Phoenix.)
(AG) There is something I would like to get across to you—it has to do with the different
atmosphere and when I was young—as you may know, during the Forties most of us in
New York were doing all-over painting. There was something in the air that made us do
that. I don't know how to explain it, but we felt that was the way painting was going. It
was all-over, there was no beginning and no end. I decided that I was tired of the
88

1
Adolph Gottlieb, Recurrent Apparition. Permission of Marlborough Gallery
Incorporated, New York.

89

paintings which were endless; which were all-over paintings. I decided that I would try to
make paintings which had a focal point very much the way a portrait had. All of the
paintings that were done after the Forties have that characteristic and I still retain that.
As you can see there is a very defined focal point.
I must say that I am not prepared to make a lecture in the usual sense that we are
accustomed to. I don't have the pedagogical approach. I think it is my prerogative as an
old man to reminisce and go back to early days. I'll have a lot of loose ends which I hope
will tie together. I think that you will find that they will tie together. I'll just go back to
when I went to Europe for the first time in 1921.1 worked my way over on the ship and
had a lot of adventures which are another story. I eventually got to Paris and I did very
little painting. I was going to the Grand Chaumiere to a sketch class where I did sketches
from life. While the instructor was supposed to be Lucien Simon, I never saw Mr. Simon. I
just went and worked on my own. And I did something that was more useful, I went to the
Louvre almost every day. I certainly went there every other day. I knew the Louvre very
well. I could go in there and find my way to any painting that I was interested in seeing. I
think this was the best experience that I could possibly have had because I think that the
real university for any young artist is the museum which has a rich collection. I think it is
much better to study with Poussin than study with Gottlieb. So you see in a sense I am
very modest. At any rate, what I wanted to say was that those days were the days of the
expatriates like Hemingway and others and it was considered to be very important to go
to Europe for an American artist. American art at that point was—well, it was very much
behind—about twenty-five years behind European art. The European Impressionists
were about twenty-five years ahead of the American Impressionists. In fact, at that time
American artists were waiting for the latest copy of Cahiers d'Art to see what was
happening in Europe and that gave them a cue as to how to proceed. So I went to Europe
and the best thing was the museums.
(JB) What would you say to the young student who wishes to train himself today?
Today I would say that he should go to New York and haunt the Metropolitan and other
museums.
And not worry about the Art Students' League?
No, I don't think the Art Students' League would do him much good.
You talked to me the other day about the importance of the shift of the art capital from Paris
to New York.
Well, I am very interested in that. I'll explain it to you. When I went to Paris and I lived in
Europe for awhile I became a Francophile. There are many great French artists whom I
admired so much that they impressed me for my whole life—older artists like Ingres,
Delacroix, and Courbet. When I came back to New York I found there was a very deeply
ingrained provincialism in the United States which seemed to stem from the Midwest
and with it came a great deal of Midwestern painting that I thought was very bad. I'm
talking about Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry. I think that, in a way, they
created a vacuum into which the next generation could step.
By being so bad?
That's right—and I think that I should tell you that in the Forties there was a lot of talk
among New York artists as to whether New York was going to be the art capital of the
world. As a personal reminiscence my wife and I used to go to Province town in the
summers in those days and in the summer of 1949 between my wife and myself and a
friend of ours named Weldon Kees, who was a very sensitive poet and painter, and Fritz
90

Bultman, who was a painter and sculptor, we started something called Forum FortyNine. In the course of the summer we had a number of interesting exhibits and forums.
The forums and exhibits took place in an old, no-longer-used, post office that we got the
use of. Each of us took turns in organizing something and my turn came up, so I organized
a forum called "French Art versus American Art." This created quite a bit of dissension.
We didn't have any exhibit of French art, we had a discussion. We did show the American
artists who were in Provincetown at the time. We invited a number of distinguished
people to this forum, among them were Stuart Preston of the New York Times and Fred
Wight, who now, I think, heads the art department at UCLA. Before the forum started
there was a group of dissidents including Hans Hofmann and Fritz Bultman who wanted
to hand out a mimeographed flyer to people who were coming in. So we said to them,
"Don't hand it out, we'll give it to everyone who buys a ticket." The flyer read something
to the effect that"... we are objecting to this program because we consider Paris the city of
light and culture and light and culture have emanated from it for the past hundred years
or more, so we are in disagreement with this topic." We then handed it out to everybody.
After the forum there was a party at someone's house. While we were at the party, I went
over to Hofmann. I said, "Hans, what did you really object to about this forum? Now that
you've heard it, don't you think that it was all right? It was an interesting discussion." He
said, "Well, I'll tell you, Adolph, you should have French art first." I asked, "Why?" He
replied, "Because French art is better than American art." So I said, "We did say Trench
Art versus American'." He said, "Well, then it's all right."
Then, there was evidence, in your mind, by 1949 that...
Oh, by 1949 we were afraid that we were being too chauvinistic about American art. So
the question came up, were we right in being too chauvinistic? I took the position that we
were entitled to it because as I saw it—well, I'll give you an example of what I mean. I was
in the Kootz Gallery one time, and I was in this back private viewing room. This was in
the middle Forties or the late Forties. Kootz had just been to Paris and had brought back
one of the latest paintings of a young Parisian painter. To show it to this collector, he put
it on a chair. Then the collector, to look at it more closely, got down and looked at it very
closely, in fact, his knee touched the floor and I thought that was very symbolic—down on
his knees before a French painting, because it was French. He would never have done
that for a new American painting. At that point I decided that chauvinism was good for
us.
What do you think that this has meant to younger artists?
I think that it has given great freedom. As an example of what I mean, I was on a
broadcast with a British critic—the broadcast was supposed to be for the BBC—and I
made a point about this. I was discussing this business about American art in relation to
European art and the ways it had been subservient to it. I said that France was like a
colonial power in art and that we were the colonists; and that in the 1940s American
artists took the tea and dumped it overboard and had their Declaration of Independence. I
was curious to see how this would go over with the British. I later saw a transcript and
they cut that out. I think the situation got reversed and America became the colonial
power artistically. The Japanese and many others, including the French, became our
subjects.
Let's talk about the WPA. You worked for a time for the WPA?
I did, yes. I think it was $23.50 a week.
A lot ofpeople have said that this was a kind of apprenticeship for young artists of that time.
I think the value of the WPA is vastly exaggerated.

91

2
Adolph Gottlieb, Burma Red, (1973). Collection of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb
Foundation, N. Y. Photograph courtesy of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, N. Y.
92

What do you think, then, of government support of the arts ?
I think that is very dangerous. It has a tendency to try to influence the artist. Just like
dealers try to influence artists.
Have they tried to influence you?
Yes. Oh, sure. Either to maintain a style or to get certain qualities that they like or that
they think are saleable.
Do you believe that the dealer system is a bad system?
No, I think that it is the best system that we have.
Then you don't agree with the dissatisfied younger artists in New York. There are a
number of dissatisfied young artistsOh, yes, but in many cases it is a matter of sour grapes. They can't seem to adapt to the
dealer system so they want to abolish it.
How do younger painters go about breaking into this system?
They have to make a little name for themselves among the New York artists. To be there,
to be in group shows, and be part of the give and take.
Then someone is not going to walk in from off the streets and knock the dealer dead with his
work?
No, that's very hard. The dealers are very jaded. They have so many artists come in every
day and show them work. They can assume before hand that it will be no good.
When you talked earlier about the "give and take" among artists, were you talking about
something like that which went on in the Club in the late 1940s?
Like the Club—where artists would express their views about what a painting should be
and what it is, and others could attack.
Where did you meet?
We met in an empty loft on Eighth Street. Sometimes we would visit in other artists'
studios and say whatever we thought.
You just spoke right out?
Well, we were friends.
Do you still have a close association with many of those artists today?
I don't. Most of us sort of outgrew this.
There has been a good deal of talk about the influence in New York in the Forties of
Europeans who arrived because of the war. People like Leger, Mondrian, Lipchitz, and
others.
Yes, I met a number of them.
Do you feel that they exerted any kind of influence on American art or do you think that
things had already been solidified by that time?
I think that by that time Surrealism was a definite influence on American art because
93

the work was being shown in New York by various dealers. Then when the artists came
over that showed us that they were just people like we were.
Do you feel that there was an impact of Surrealism on your work during this period?
Yes, I think so—definitely. There was a gallery in New York called Gallery Sixty-Seven.
It had a show called "A Problem for Critics." It included my work, Pollock's, Rothko's,
Hofmann's, and a number of others. The problem was how to characterize this work. Most
of it had some Surrealist influence. A lot of it had some Cubist influence. I felt that the
work we all were doing was kind of a merger of both—Surrealism and abstraction.
Were you people interested in the abstraction of George L.K. Morris and the people in the
American Abstract Artists group? Did you have much contact with them?
No. Well, they were friendly. Actually, what happened, as I see it, was that the American
Abstract group was very dogmatic about their idea of abstraction. If anybody had any
figurative tendency at all his work was taboo. At that point, I, and a lot of other artists,
didn't share that view.
You didn't agree with the Metropolitan Museum, I believe, in 1950 when the eighteen of
youThat's right. That was the Pepsi-Cola show. The objection was that there were two local
jurors in all parts of the country which would make it regional. I think part of our
viewpoint was against regional art which was one of the big phases of American art. We
felt that regional art was provincial and retrogressive.
What you called therrCorn-Belt Academy" in your letter to the New York Times in 1943?
That's right. I'd forgotten about that.
You wrote in Tiger's Eye in 1947 about your art being rf... the expression of the neurosis
which is reality." That sounds parallel to Surrealist concerns. What do you think of this in
terms of your art today ?
Well, I think it has a relationship. You see, I was very much interested, as a lot of artists
were, in Jung at the time. I accepted the idea of a universal unconscious.
And by working in this kind of imagery you were getting to this universal unconscious by
speaking a kind of common language. Yet, don't I understand that you feel you are really
not trying to paint for the masses?
Good Lord, no. Just the reverse. You know what Gorky called Social Realism at the time?
He called it poor art for poor people.
(Reading a question submitted in advance) "How essential is it to the livelihood of the
artist for his imagery to be recognizably his own and do you feel this degree of sameness is a
compromise to maintain a level of success?"
That's a very good question. Every day an artist has to examine his feelings and ask
himself if this is what he really wants. It becomes more difficult if you are successful
because you might be doing something to satisfy a demand; a market that's been created.
Or you might be doing just the opposite to be perverse. I have a great deal of perversity in
me, so I always have to question it. I assume that this is true of lots of artists. If they
weren't a little perverse in some way they wouldn't be artists. They would conform to
something.
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The common question from students submitted to me in advance was, "Who or what had
the greatest influence on your work?"
Oh, Cimabue. He has a very forceful image.
(Reading) "In your earlierjpictograph paintings even though individual, personal symbols
were compartmented, the surface treatment of the painting appeared to have an all-over
sameness. In later "Blast" pictures a different approach is employed in the execution of the
top half of the painting from that used in the bottom half. What is your feeling about the
idea, perhaps best exemplified by the color-field painters, that a painting should be all of
one piece?
That's a good question. I'll try to explain it. When I did the pictograph paintings I was
thinking of them as all-over paintings, with no focal point and no beginning—they ran
out on all four sides. And I reached a point where I felt that I had enough of all-over
painting and that it was a kind of New York mania. I wanted to buck the other painters
and all I had been doing, so I reversed myself and decided to make paintings with a
definite focal point, which at the same time would control in some subtle way the space of
painting. I think it's just as simple as that. Just that I decided I might go do a different
kind of painting.
In your later works, do you use trowels and other kinds of devices on the bottom part of those
paintings where one sees those big strokes?
I work in many ways. I try everything. Miro once said that he tried everything including
urinating on the painting. I doubt that he did it.
(Reading) "Many people sincerely feel that Jackson Pollock is the greatest painter of our
century. How do you feel about this?"
I think that he is vastly over-rated. I think he used to seem to be a violent painter. He now
seems to me to be a gentle, lyrical painter, especially in the painting at the Met called
"Autumn Rhythm." It is a very gentle, lyrical painting. And when you met him as a man,
if you got him when he was sober, he was very gentle.
(From the Floor) In your opinion what should be the function of an art instructor in a
university?
I am very much in wonder as to what the function of the instructor is. I don't think the
instructor can make an artist out of someone who isn't an artist. I think that you are an
artist when you start or you're not. There is no such thing as an art student unless you
accept the idea that you are a student all of your life. I don't think that the university is.
the good place at all. I think the place to go is to a museum. You have to go and look at
Chardin and Courbet and see how they did it. If you don't have the capacity to learn,
nobody can give it to you. Years ago the big question was that everyone was looking for a
key or a clue; some sort of a formula for making a work of art. Nobody ever found it.
(From the Floor) What is your opinion of the art of 1960s; Funk and Junk, Op and Pop,
Minimal art, and art of the 1970s?
I think that my generation is largely responsible for a lot of it and I feel ashamed for us.
In what way do you feel responsible?
Anything could be a work of art—almost anything—and the artist was completely free to
do anything he chose.
(From the Floor) You implied that contrary to painting for the masses, your art was a very
personal and private statement. I wonder if that could be extended to invalidate the
95

political and social art forms?
I think the didactic art that the Mexicans tried to do had no value because whatever
message they had could have been gotten across to the masses better by television or the
movies. The same thing is true in the Soviet Union. Their painters, I believe, convinced
very few people.
(From the Floor) I wasn't thinking in terms of "convincing" but rather rrcommenting
Oh, "commenting." If there is no convincing, what value is the comment?
(From the Floor) I wonder if you have ever experimented with polymer or other synthetic
paints?
I have used acrylics, that's all. I think that one of the worst things about contemporary
painting is the excessive use of acrylics and masking tapes.
(From the Floor) When you say that the Abstract Expressionists have become a major
influence in the world, was the acceptance gradual or overnight—as a group or individually? How did it happen?
It took many years to get acceptance. That put us in the position of being part of the
establishment which wasn't very comfortable.
(From the Floor) Can you comment on what the function of critics might be, if any—critics
like Greenberg or Rosenberg?
I think people like Greenberg or Rosenberg have a great deal of influence.
Do you think it is all to the good?
Frankly, if they are on my side, I think it is good.
(From the Floor) In titling your paintings, how do you come about the wording if, as you
say, the subjects are very personal and not able to be understood by using words.
I have a great deal of difficulty with titles. I like them to be ambiguous. I look at the
painting and I try to think of what it suggests. I'll come up with that kind of a title which
is ambiguous. It is very generalized and somewhat abstracted.
(From the Floor) You were saying that students should go to a museum. Do you mean by
this that a serious art student should study the big names and imitate their styles before
starting his or her own style?
Yes, the big names. I don't think they will form their own style until they have done that.
(From the Floor) Is it a lot harder for a woman to get established-to get a name? If it is, how
much longer will it take?
I think it is harder for a woman especially if she is black.
(From the Floor) How long was it before you became self-supporting from your art?
It wasn't until about the 1950s. There was a parallel question asked by a student when I
was teaching at UCLA, "Mr. Gottlieb, about how much do you make a year from your
paintings?" I said that is between me and the Treasury Department.
96

THREE RECENT
ART REFERENCE BOOKS
Winberta Yao

Joachim Busse, Internationales Handbuch aller Maler und Bildhauer des 19.
Jahrhunderts: Busse-Verzeichnis. Busse Kunst Dokumentation, (Wiesbaden, 1977)
Geraldine Norman, Nineteenth Century Painters and Painting: A Dictionary. University
of California Press, (Berkeley, 1977)
Colin Nash and Genesis P-Orridge, eds. Contemporary Artist. St. Martin's, (New York,
1977)

Thieme-Becker1 and Benezit2 are the old, established biographical works on
artists initiated and completed many years ago. Though dated in many instances and
even containing incorrect information at times, they are still valuable and still used. To
fill current needs and vacuums, new biographical compendiums for artists of one kind or
another are continually being compiled and issued. The best are those which are carefully defined and implemented, adhere to high standards of scholarship, and serve areas
that are untouched by Thieme-Becker and Benezit. An outstanding example is A Dictionary of Japanese Artists: Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Prints, Lacquer by Laurance
P. Roberts (1976).
In recent months, three new titles have appeared. Their contents are
examined here and their merits assessed.
In keeping with the new interest in the nineteenth century as a whole, two of
these deal with artists of that period. The first, Internationales Handbuch aller Maler
und Bildhauer des 19. Jahrhunderts: Busse-Verzeichnis (International Directoiy of All
XlXth Century Painters and Sculptors: Busse-Index) by Joachim Busse (1977) is 1403
pages in length and about the size of a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. It has
small print and thumb-indexed pages of dictionary-weight. Containing the names of
some 89,000 artists, it is a computer-produced index and its information is arranged as in
a computer print-out in columns giving (1) surname; (2) Christian name; (3) sex; (4) year
of birth; (5) places where artist worked; (6) year of death; (7) nationality; (8) techniques
used; (9) motifs and themes of work; (10) literature references. It is this last category that
provides the key to the entire work.
The names listed in the Busse-Index were culled from thirteen biographical
dictionaries of artists, three auction sales indexes, and the "Busse Archives," a file
maintained over a twenty-year period by the author. It did not take much more than a
cursory glance (even with 89,000 names) to notice that Thieme-Becker, Vollmer3 and
Benezit were the chief sources to which the user is referred for information. The presence
97

of and the importance accorded to Vollmer, the supplement to Thieme-Becker for
twentieth-century artists, seems curiously out of place here but, as will be indicated
below, the definition of the nineteenth century is very broad in this work. Of the others,
four are German works or cover only German artists, two are on Austrian artists, two are
for the British, and one each for Dutch and Italian artists. No American biographical
dictionaries were used as a source — leading to the absence of a number of American
names, especially those considered as Western artists.
There is, quite obviously, an orientation towards the German-speaking countries. Two of the other German sources4 are not listed in the Guide to Art Reference Books
by Mary Chamberlin (1959) and there is reason to believe that neither one is readily
available for consultation in the United States. The one that is listed by Chamberlin
turned out upon inspection to be a very ordinary source,5 furnishing brief, routine,
undocumented information. Compiled at about the same time as the first edition of
Benezit, it did not gain the universal acceptance that was accorded to the French
dictionary.
It seems, then, that the Busse-Index would be of limited use to those already
knowledgeable in the basic biographical tools of art history and able to go directly to the
proper sources without guidance. To those who might claim an interest in* having the
names of nineteenth-century artists isolated from those of other centuries, the
nineteenth-century designation, as it is developed here, is quite imprecise — incorporating artists still living after 1806 and born by 1880, and spanning in effect a period of time
from 1750 to 1950. And to those who might look to such a compendium to detect names of
lesser-knowns, there is no dearth of minor artists to be found in other dictionaries of
artists — particularly in Benezit which has, for instance, simply taken names from the
catalogues of the Paris Salon and included them without further research. The determination of exactly what purpose or group this volume might best serve may be found in the
background of the compiler himself. Herr Busse is the founder and managing partner of
Busse Kunst Dokumentation of Wiesbaden, West Germany — a business which was the
outgrowth of his twenty years as a collector of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
graphic art. Taking a clue from this, together with his inclusion of three art sales indexes
among the literature sources, it may be inferred that this volume is most suitable as a
reference tool for art dealers and collectors who, incidentally, may be the ones most
willing — and able — to pay the price of $215.00 for it. A volume like this also illustrates
a recent publishing trend with dealers compiling their own files of reference sources to
serve them in their work (cf. Lauris Mason, Print Reference Sources, 1975, and Peggy and
Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American
West, 1976).
Turning to the other new dictionary on the nineteenth century, Norman's
dictionary could not be more different from the Busse-Index. Instead of aiming at a
comprehensive listing of many thousands, it is selective — containing just over 700
entries, primarily of artists but including also nineteenth-century movements and
groups in art. Although there is an admitted bias towards eighteenth-century artists
working into the nineteenth-century, its chronological boundaries are more confined
since it excludes artists who had not produced significant work before 1900. It is a
dictionary with a stated purpose — to redress the balance of treatment "in favor of
nineteenth-century avant-garde art over academic as it appears in twentieth-century
literature;" to show the interaction that often took place among artists even though they
embraced different styles; and to focus attention on the national schools which flourished
in that period. Names or terms mentioned within an entry for an artist are printed in
block letters when there is a separate listing for it, thus serving as a cross-reference and
creating a kind of network linking artists to each other or to movements.
The information provided for each entry is basic, concise and uniform in
pattern. Almost all end with: "There are works in [locations] or... ?" Bibliographical
98

references — most of which are taken from Thieme-Becker except for more recent
titles — and small illustrated examples of work in black-and-white, arranged on the
same page as the entry, are provided for about two-thirds of the artists. However, as a
contribution to the standard reference shelf in an academic institution, it is not entirely
successful on two grounds: (1) It generally gives only as much information as in Benezit
in an equivalent amount of space — making it, in effect, a kind of translation of Benezit
for those artists included in Norman; (2) There is no discernible criterion for inclusion of
an artist, particularly the minor ones.
We know now — courtesy of Busse — that there are more or less 89,000
names to contend with in nineteenth-century art. From among this mass of names, how
did Norman ever single out less than one per cent of that total for her dictionary? Would
the identity of the author again provide an answer? Geraldine Norman is the saleroom
correspondent for the Times (London), and the editor of a 1903 volume entitled Dutch
Painters of the 19th Century by G.H. Marius, reissued in an English translation by the
Antique Collectors Club in 1973. By nature of her occupation, she has an awareness of the
current popularity factor of an artist — how "fashionable" (her term) he is in the marketplace. A sample checking of Benezit, which includes sale prices of an artist's work,
revealed that probably some three-fourths of the names included in her dictionary were
those who had works sold in international art markets in the 1960's and 1970's — some
quite actively. It may be possible to conjecture that the sale of an artist's work at an
auction was, therefore, a means whereby his name came to the attention of the author as
a candidate for her dictionary.
Whatever the case may be, this book is attractive in format and carefully put
together (except for the abrupt placement of sixteen pages of text and colored plates
between the first two pages and the concluding one of the Introduction). It provides a
general and readable picture of painting in the nineteenth century through thumbnail
synopses of its practitioners. It will be useful for quick identification of some of the artists'
groups not too easily found elsewhere such as "Les Vingt" and "Scapigliatura." And most
certainly in its favor is the fact that it is in English.
The third title under review, Contemporary Artists, is another weighty
tome — 1300 artists and 1077 pages long. It is based on a laudable concept — that of
providing bio-bibliographical documentation on the lives and work of artists for the most
part still between thirty and fifty years of age.
For each artist, personal and professional vitae are given — including such
useful facts as his/her dealer as well as personal mailing addresses. This is followed by
other categories of material that list Individual Shows, Selected Group Shows, Collections, and Publications — By and On the Artist. Concluding each entry is an individual
statement by the artist if available, and, for most, a signed essay on his/her work by
various reviewers. Black-and-white illustrations of mediocre quality are scattered
throughout the volume. It is modelled on the series Contemporary Writers of the English
Language by the same publishers.
Although this new work has recently been selected as "An Outstanding
Reference Book of 1978" by the American Library Association, this reviewer has found it
wanting in several respects. Publications breaking new ground are in special need of
strong editorial direction — and such guidance would undoubtedly have enabled Contemporary Artists to fulfill its potential more effectively. To begin with, its scope is much
too ambitious — and a definition of "contemporary" as it is used here is sorely needed. It
is implied from the Introduction that the focus would be on those engaged in "current art
activity." Reinforcing this expectation are the selection guidelines which state that to be
eligible for inclusion one had to be a "professional artist for at least five years" and, for
younger artists, "should have already attracted serious critical attention." At the same
time, it is stated that even though no artist deceased before 1930 would be included, the
"inclusion of deceased artists is dependent upon their continuing influence ..." The main
99

thrust of the volume thus becomes blurred. Although Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Kollwitz,
Henri, Demuth and Hopper (and many others born before 1900) all technically qualify for
inclusion, they should more properly be in a separate volume entitled perhaps "Pioneers
and Precursors" in order to make room for the dozens of living artists with outstanding
reputations that are not listed but have as legitimate a claim to be included as those who
are. To users of John Walker's Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design Since 1945 (2nd
edition, 1977), this new volume would be a natural source to turn to for biographical
information on the artists associated with the various contemporary groups and
movements — but a great number of them (such as the members of the "Hairy Who") are
not to be found here. Following the system used in the series on Contemporary Writers,
the recommendation of names was the function of an international group of advisors —
but it should also have been the responsibility of the editors, Colin Nash — who writes
reviews for a London magazine, Art and Artists, which reports on current art
exhibitions — and Genesis P-Orridge (pseudonym), a performance and mail artist, to
oversee and ensure a more even, thorough coverage. In any case, they do admit to
"rough-and-ready criteria" which were sometimes set aside "in favour of more instinctive
preferences."
This over-flexibility also makes itself felt in an uneven geographical treatment. Whether it is because the United States actually has more "contemporary artists"
or because it had more representation among the advisors than any country, Americans
seem to predominate in this volume, followed by the British — who had the second most
representation in the advisory group. Argentina had one representative and Mexico
none — with the result that at least twelve natives from the South American country are
included and only four from the country bordering the United States — Rivera, Orozco,
Siquieros and Cuevas (Tamayo, though still living and mentioned in the entry on Orozco,
was forgotten). Further numerical analysis is not feasible because of another deficiency
in this volume — the lack of indices.
With such a large amount of data accumulated in one volume, indices are an
absolute requisite to facilitate different kinds of access. For this volume there should be
indices by nationality — so that names may be located by country; by sex — so that we
may follow the achievements of women artists; and even by pseudonyms — so frequently
used by contemporary artists. The most needed ones for this volume would be those that
list artists by the media in which they work and by their fields, such as minimal or
conceptual. This kind of identification of an artist is absent from the vita and is often not
readily apparent without reference to the critical essay at the end of the entry.
Additional evidence that this volume could have been more carefully prepared appears in the main body of the entries. Examples of omissions and errors will be
cited only from among artists in Phoenix-area museums. For instance, the outstanding
monograph by Lincoln Kirstein on Elie Nadelman (1973) is not listed in the bibliography
for this sculptor. Although Jose Luis Cuevas and Wayne Thiebaud both had individual
shows at the Phoenix Art Museum in 1974 and 1976 respectively, the dates of their last
one-man exhibitions are given as 1972 and 1967. "Appel's Appels," a show organized by
the New York Cultural Center and seen at the Phoenix Art Museum in 1974 does not
appear under Karel Appel's name. The Phoenix Art Museum was included as among
collections with work by such artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Stephen Antonakos and
Irene Rice Pereira — but not for countless others. When it is listed, it appears variously
as "Phoenix Museum of Art" (Claude Tousignant, Alf Dunn and Ernest Trova) or
"Phoenix Museum" (Arnaldo Pomodoro). Both the Arizona State University Art Collections and Phoenix Art Museum hold work by Stuart Davis and Georgia O'Keeffe, but this
is mentioned only for Arizona State University — and then in the case of O'Keeffe, the
location is given as "Arizona State College, Flagstaff." Such examples bear out the fact
that Arizona's art collections are indeed not sufficiently known outside the state, as noted
100

in the preface to PHOEBUS I (page 4).
There are further areas that need clarification. Were the artists' statements
specially prepared for this volume — or taken from some previously published work?
Why were critical essays not provided for every artist? And who are the essayists? The
names of Lawrence Alloway and Andrew Forge were recognized in a single essay apiece
(there may have been more) — and several were finally tracked down as colleagues of the
editor in the previously mentioned magazine, Art and Artists, but beyond that nothing
further was available on their background. There should be a section on "Notes on
Advisors and Contributors" such as is in the series on Contemporary Writers to help the
reader in his evaluation of the essays.
Prospective users of this biographical dictionary are urged not to let the
imperfections of a maiden work deter them from consulting it — but to be forewarned
and to be aware of the need to check, confirm, or supplement the data supplied, as need be.
It is quite true, as the editors say, that this volume is the "most comprehensive beginning
ever made." An improved and revised edition will surely be issued — perhaps in some
form of complementary collaboration with another volume, the Dictionary of Contemporary American Artists (3rd edition, 1977), edited by Paul Cummings who, incidentally, is
also a member of the advisory group of Contemporary Artists.

FOOTNOTES
^lrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Kiinstler von der
Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1907-50), 37 vols.
2Emmanuel Benezit, Dictionnaire Critique et Documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs,
Dessinateurs et Graveurs. New edition, (Paris, 1976), 10 vols. The first edition was
published 1911-1923.
3Hans Vollmer, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Kiinstler des XX. Jahrhunderts
(Leipzig, 1953-1962), 6 vols.
4Friedrich von Boetticher, Malerwerke des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig,
1944-48), 2 vols. This is an "unaltered reprint" of the original 1891-1901 edition. Willy
Dressier, Kunsthandbuch, Zweiter Band. DasBuch der Lebenden Deutschen Kiinstler,
Altertumsforscher, Kunstgelehrten und Kunstschriftsteller, Bildende Kunst (Berlin,
1930).
5Hermann A. Muller and Hans Singer, AllgemeinesKiinstler-Lexikon, Leben und Werke
der Beriihmtesten Bildenden Kiinstler (Frankfurt, 1921-22), 6 vols.

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