The Landscape Painting of China: Musings of a Journeyman by Harrie A. Vanderstappen (review)

In his posthumous book The Landscape Painting of China: Musings of a Journeyman, art historian Harrie Vanderstappen (1921–2007) presents a comprehensive survey of China’s landscape genre from the earliest surviving paintings to the end of the Ming dynasty. During the twilight years of Vanderstappen’s life, his last student, Roger Covey (1954–2013), did the final editorial revisions of the original manuscript, which Covey describes as “a lifetime of deep study, detailed visual analysis, and profound thinking about Chinese art” (pp. 304–305). By virtue of its visual approach, The Landscape Painting of China: Musings of a Journeyman (hereafter Musings) gives its readers a chance to experience many of China’s greatest paintings through the eyes of a veteran scholar. Fluid prose, clear organization, and over two-hundred color reproductions make Musings as enjoyable as it is illuminating. This review criticizes Musings for a lack of clear argumentation and theoretical depth, as well as for occasional moments of generalization due its very broad scope. Nonetheless, Vanderstappen’s rich discussion of technique and his connoisseurial attention to formal details distinguish this book as one of the finest surveys of Chinese landscape painting to date. Beyond its value to scholars and enthusiasts of Chinese art, Musings would serve as an ideal textbook for undergraduate art history courses on Chinese landscape painting.

Throughout the chapters of Musings, Vanderstappen makes the provocative argument that landscape painting in China was a form of ritual practice. He does not state this argument directly at the book’s outset; rather, the tendency toward this assertion builds as the text proceeds, until the word “ritual” begins to appear on nearly every other page. For example, Vanderstappen describes one landscape as “a pictorial ritual of unquestioned self-confidence” (p. 83). Elsewhere, he refers to early landscape painting as “the ritual of form-giving” (p. 147). In reference to another landscape, Vanderstappen remarks that its “textures of ink and dots carry out a transparent ritual” (p. 143). He hints at “the deeper meanings of the rituals of painting” (p. 242), and in another chapter he speaks to the “ritual gesture” that Chinese painters give to the forces of nature (p. 198). By the end of the second chapter, it becomes clear that Vanderstappen understands landscape painting precisely as a kind of ritual performance transmitted from artist to artist through the ages. The term first appears in the introduction, where he asserts that the movements of the brush in Chinese landscape painting entail “a total submission to the ritual created by artists who have aligned themselves over centuries to bring stroke patterns into harmony with the tracings of nature” (p. 9). This understanding of landscape painting as ritual practice has been considered previously by scholars, most notably by Mai-Mai Sze in The Tao of Painting: A Study on the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). However, perhaps due to Sze’s ahistorical and less than scholarly approach to painting, most art historians have since refrained from drawing links between landscape painting and ritual. Vanderstappen’s Musings is therefore one of the first works in decades to reconsider landscape painting through the lens of ritual.

While the innovative ritual framework offers a new way to consider the genre of landscape painting, the organization of Musings enhances the book’s readability. Its chapter titles conform to the theme established by the book’s subtitle, Musings of a Journeyman. Beginning with the first, “Musings from an Oxcart,” which focuses on the paintings of the Five Dynasties and Northern Song periods, each chapter centers on a common element of subject matter relevant to the paintings it addresses. “Musings from a Thousand-Foot Cliff” concentrates on the latter half of the Northern Song and then the Southern Song, “Musings from an Empty Cottage” the Yuan, “Musings by the Sound of a Garden Stream” the...