Dong Qichang

Dong Qichang the Chinese painter, calligrapher, theorist and official of the late Ming dynasty (1555-1636) who dominated the artistic life of his age and whose theories of painting shaped the practice and the criticism of Chinese art for centuries. He articulated the influential distinction between the northern and southern schools and championed the scholar-amateur tradition over the professional and academic manner.

Life and Official Career

Dong Qichang was born in 1555 in Huating, near Songjiang in the province of Jiangsu, into a family of modest circumstances. He was a gifted student and succeeded brilliantly in the examination system, passing the highest degree and embarking upon a long and distinguished career in the imperial bureaucracy. He rose to high office, serving in a number of important posts, including that of minister, and he was deeply implicated in the politics of the late Ming court.

His official life was interrupted more than once by retirement, illness and political trouble, and he used these intervals to devote himself to painting, calligraphy and the study of old masters. He acquired a great collection of works attributed to the painters of the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, and his close examination of these paintings gave him an unrivalled knowledge of the tradition. His wealth and position enabled him to become one of the foremost connoisseurs of his time.

He survived the factional strife of the late Ming and died in 1636 at the age of eighty-one, honoured and wealthy. His long life spanned the last decades of the dynasty, and his influence upon the taste of the period was immense. He was buried with high honours, and his descendants continued to cherish his artistic legacy.

Theory of Painting and the Northern and Southern Schools

Dong Qichang is best known for his theory of the two lineages of Chinese landscape painting, which he set out in essays and inscriptions. He distinguished a southern school, composed of scholar-amateurs who painted for personal expression and whose tradition he traced through Wang Wei to the Yuan masters, from a northern school of professional and academic painters who worked in a more laborious and decorative manner.

He held that the southern school embodied the true spirit of painting, in which technique serves the expression of the artist's mind and character, while the northern school, whatever its skill, was inferior because it valued surface accomplishment over inner meaning. This distinction, though it simplified a far more complex history, gave later critics and painters a framework within which to judge and to place works of art.

His theory rested upon a conviction that painting is essentially an art of the mind, and that the copyist who merely reproduces appearances misses its deepest purpose. He emphasised the importance of studying the old masters not as models to be copied literally but as sources of insight into the principles of brushwork and composition, and he compared the painter's task to that of the scholar interpreting a classic.

Painting and Calligraphy

As a painter Dong Qichang worked chiefly in landscape, and he developed a highly personal style that reduced natural forms to patterns of brush and ink. His mountains, rocks, trees and clouds are constructed from a vocabulary of abstract strokes, and the interest of his pictures lies less in their resemblance to particular places than in the rhythm and structure of the painting itself.

He drew upon the styles of the old masters, quoting and transforming their motifs, and he often produced works that are meditations upon the tradition rather than direct portrayals of nature. His use of ink is subtle and varied, and his manipulation of light and shade within the monochrome medium creates effects of great atmospheric delicacy. His late works are especially admired for their boldness and freedom.

As a calligrapher he was equally celebrated and was regarded as one of the greatest of his age. He practised a range of scripts and developed a manner that was admired for its vigour, its balance and its intellectual authority. He insisted upon the connection between calligraphy and painting, holding that both expressed the character of the writer or painter through the handling of the brush.

Connoisseurship and Cultural Authority

Dong Qichang was the most influential connoisseur of painting of his generation, and his judgments and attributions carried enormous weight. His opinions, sometimes based upon questionable evidence, nevertheless shaped the collections of his patrons and the understanding of the tradition for centuries. He was frequently asked to authenticate and to evaluate paintings, and his inscriptions remain attached to many important works.

He was also a collector on a grand scale, and his own holdings formed a kind of library of the art of the past. Through his study of these works he refined his theories and his style, and he used his collection to support his arguments about the proper lineage of painting. His combination of wealth, office, learning and artistic skill gave him an authority unmatched by any of his contemporaries.

His influence extended through his pupils and through later artists who adopted his theories and his manner. Painters of the early Qing, including the orthodox masters of the following century, looked back to him as their principal teacher, and his ideas were further spread by his many writings and by the circulation of his works among collectors and literati throughout the country.

Influence and Legacy

Dong Qichang stands at the centre of late Ming and early Qing art, and his theories and his style dominated the orthodox tradition of Chinese painting into the twentieth century. Later painters and critics either followed his lead or reacted against it, and the debate over the values he championed remained a central issue in the criticism of Chinese art for generations.

His influence was not confined to painting. Through his calligraphy and his writings he helped to define the taste of the educated elite, and his ideas about the relationship between tradition, imitation and personal expression touched upon fundamental questions in the aesthetics of his culture. His prominence in official life also gave his artistic views a prestige they might otherwise have lacked.

He is remembered as a commanding and controversial figure, admired for his learning, his taste and his technical mastery, and criticised for the rigidity of his categories and the partisan character of his judgments. His paintings and calligraphy are held in the great collections of the world, and his theories continue to be studied as one of the most influential statements of the scholar-painter's ideal.

See also

• Chinese painting
• Literati painting
• Wu school
• Chinese calligraphy