Qian Qianyi's Reflections on Yellow Mountain: Traces of a Late-Ming Hatchet and Chisel

3. Hills and Waterways: Yellow Mountain in Seventeenth-Century Visual Culture

Hills and Waterways 49 Hills and Waterways Yellow Mountain in Seventeenth-Century Visual Culture 3 The intimate connection between fine art and travel had been established for centuries by the time Guo Xi failed to mention Yellow Mountain among the empire’s great peaks. The “recumbent travelling” 臥遊 associated with Zong Bing 宗炳 (zi Shaowen 少文; 375–443) had early become an important part of the world of the literati, a means by which the hapless scholar might break from the drudgery of yamen life without leaving his desk, or by which an ailing man might still roam the great landscapes long after his youth had left him. The idea still resonated with literati of the Ming; the desire expressed by a man such as He Liangjun to “travel to the Five Marchmounts from my couch,” would have been understood as an explicit reference to Zong.1 Painted images seem also to have become accepted as an adjunct to the travel experience, and in 1541 we find Lu Shusheng viewing landscapes “in wind and rain, by dusk or dawn, under lamplight or by fireside,” while on his way to the capital for his jinshi examination.2 Did Qian Qianyi complement his journey of 1641 with a viewing of painted images of Yellow Mountain? That he probably did is suggested strongly by what we can read both inside and outside of his essay. His friend, the noted painter Cheng Jiasui is unable to make the trip, but remains a strong metaphorical presence, accompanying Qian in the form of a painted fan (presumably a view of the mountain) that appears in Part V. To find a replacement travelling companion Qian stops first in Xiuning, where he enlists the company of Wu Shi 吳栻 (zi Quchen 去塵), whose family owned one of the largest and most important art collections of the region. Wu family patronage seems to have been directly or indirectly responsible for a significant portion 50 Qian Qianyi’s Reflections on Yellow Mountain of Yellow Mountain paintings produced during the Ming; in this case they could be regarded almost as portraits of the family estate, as much of Huizhou including large sections of the mountain itself was actually owned by the Wu clan.3 Presumably a viewing of the Wu collection would have prefaced the two men’s travels, and the acquisition of the Wang Wei handscroll seems likely to have been mediated by a member of the clan (Qian is frustratingly vague about how the purchase occurred). Such treasures, we saw above, acquired real meaning only in the hands of a worthy owner. In the hands of a merchant it was “buried under a mountain of copper cash.” This at least is how Qian Qianyi relates the story of the painting. In reality, of course, the role of the market in late-Ming art production and consumption was extremely complex, and one that has only in recent years begun to receive adequate scholarly attention.4 It is becoming clear that the demand created by an expanding population of art buyers in the early seventeenth century was at the very least crucial to the maintenance of élite status for those men who preferred to see themselves as fitting within the traditional scholar-artist ideal. Patronage of visual arts by wealthy merchants took a range of forms, from short-term commissions to long-term friendships between patron and artist.5 The number of painting inscriptions referring, sometimes rather obliquely, to favours and obligations, attests to the important role such objects could play in the complex web of interactions that made up élite society. However much Qian Qianyi professed to be appalled by the reduction of a cultural treasure to a mountain of copper cash, he was himself a willing participant in the market for cultural relics; it was his sale in 1643 of a rare Song-dynasty volume (that had once belonged to the eminent Ming scholar Wang Shizhen 王世貞 [zi Yuanmei 元美, hao Fengzhou 鳳洲; 1526– 90]) to his student Xie Sanbin 謝三賓 (zi Xiangsan 象三, hao Saiweng 塞翁) that would allow him to pay for the construction of his ill-fated Tower of Crimson Clouds.6 Qian must also have understood that a part of the monetary value of the Wang Wei handscroll was being created by his self-inscription, not to mention that of Dong Qichang, into the provenance of the work, with the composition of the colophon suggesting at least implicit recognition of this process. The considerable task of undertaking a thorough analysis of the effects of patronage and...