Day 79 - Woodblock print - "Old Tree, Bamboo, and Rock"

August 8, 2018

The theme of this gallery (213) is the "art-historical landscape," the way in which later painters emulated and sought to add their own interpretations to the works of earlier masters. While the preponderance of the gallery's contents are landscape paintings, my eye is also drawn to two very large wardrobes from the late 16th or early 17th century (the Ming dynasty). Made of wood, they are exquisitely adorned with flowers and birds made of inlays of mother-of-pearl, amber, colored glass, ivory, and other materials.  I would love to have one in my home, but my ceilings aren't nearly high enough! The space they originally occupied must have been grand indeed.

Today's object is a fan-shaped woodblock print, perhaps 13 inches across at the top, by the painter Wang Gai (1645-1710) and based on earlier works by painters of the 11th and 16th centuries. It was a leaf from a 1679 book called the "Mustard Seed Garden of Painting," a manual on how to paint the key components of landscapes (trees, rocks, and human figures),  and how to incorporate the styles of the old masters. This print is called "Old Tree, Bamboo, and Rock" (although perhaps it should be "Rocks" in the plural), and the artist has captured the essence of all three elements. The tree is a gnarly old pine with a shaggy trunk indicated by thick, twisting outlines. Its upper branches are denuded of leaves and reach out into the empty space. The bamboo, in contrast, is a delicate tracery of thin lines denoting the stalks and airy clusters of three leaves each.  The largest rock is a thickly outlined pyramidal form without much detail, but it conveys the solidity of the formation. 

At home I search on the internet for the works by the earlier painters that inspired this. From what I can tell, I prefer Wang Gai's version.