Colors of Mount Emei (Emeishan se)

Artists

Description

Dong Shouping (1904-1997) painted this short hanging scroll in ink and colors on paper. It depicts Mt. Emei's famous and very colorful sunrise. A mass of rocks--presumably the mountain's summit--occupies the left half, and more, of the painting, its diagonally set ridges alternating with valleys. The waterfall that emerges from a valley in the painting's lower left corner disappears into the mist at the bottom of the painting. Pines cluster around the lone, simple house that is perched at the right edge of the mountain mass. Their details obscured by mist, distant peaks occupy the right portion of the composition. The uppermost portion of the painting is blank, suggesting the sky. Because Mt. Emei is famous for its colorful sunrise, the artist has employed a warm orange as the painting's dominant color. The painting was mounted in Japan and thus boasts a traditional Japanese mounting with free-moving futai ornaments. This painting is not dated by inscription; we have dated it to c. 1961 on the basis of its stylistic similarity to the other Lin-bequest painting by Dong Shouping--which also represents Mt. Emei and also shows warm orange tones--which is dated by inscription to 1961. The artist, Dong Shouping (1904-1997), was born in Hongdong, Shanxi province, in 1904. He received a BA in economics from Eastern University, Beijing, in 1926, after which he began to paint by studying masterworks of traditional painting on the then newly established National Palace Museum, Beijing. By 1931 he had become well-known as a connoisseur of Chinese painting and as a professional painter of birds and flowers; at that time he began to hone his skills as a landscape painter. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45, i.e., World War II), Dong Shouping lived in Chengdu, Sichuan province; in order to broaden his skill as a landscape painter, he traveled as widely as circumstances permitted, taking in as many varied landscape types as he could. It was during these years that he came to know and love Mt. Emei. After both the Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil wars had ended, Dong Shouping took up residence in Beijing. In 1953 he joined Rongbaozhai Art Publishing House, Beijing, as a specialist in woodblock printing; he worked there until 1965, where he retired. He served as honorary chairman of the Beijing Society for the Research of Traditional Chinese Paintings, and he was a member of the Chinese Artists' Association. Mt Emei sits at the western rim of the Sichuan Basin; at 3,099 meters (10,167 ft), it is the highest of China's Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains. The "patron saint" of Mt. Emei is the Buddhist Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, known in Chinese as Puxian Pu. Mt. Emei was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. Mt. Emei enjoys a special reverence in the minds of traditional Chinese as it is the location of the first Buddhist temple built in China in the first century CE. The site boasts seventy-six Buddhist monasteries dating to the Ming and Qing periods, most of them located near the mountain's top. Mt. Emei is famous for its colorful spectacles, which include the sunrise and the Clouds Sea both of which are best seen from the mountain's Golden Summit and both of which have been considered famous natural wonders for centuries. The sunrise is varied, but optimally begins with the ground and sky being in the same dark purple, soon showing rosy clouds, followed by a bright purple arc and then a semicircle where the sun is coming up. The Clouds Sea includes several cloud phenomena, e.g. clouds appearing in the sky above, in addition to the regular clouds beneath.

Dimensions

painting proper: H. 40.4 x W. 67.8 cm (15 7/8 x 26 11/16 in.) mounting, with cord and roller ends: H. 167.6 x W. 90.5 cm (66 x 35 5/8 in.) mounting silk only: H. 160 x W. 84.5 cm (63 x 33 1/4 in.)

Provenance

Edmund Lin (1928-2006; Professor, Harvard Medical School), Boston; by bequest to the Harvard Art Museum