Where our painters have chosen wood or canvas as a ground, the Chinese
have employed silk or paper. While our art recognizes that drawing itself,
quite apart from painting, is a sufficient objective, drawing and painting
have always been closely intermingled in the Far East. While the mediums
used in Europe for painting in color, distemper, tempera and oil, led to
an exact study of form, the colors employed by the Orientals--at times
brilliant, at times subdued with an almost studied restraint--preserved a
singular fluidity and lent themselves to undefined evanescences which gave
them a surprising charm.
The early paintings were generally done on cotton, coarse silk or paper.
In the eighth century, under the T'ang dynasty, the use of finer silk
began. The dressing was removed with boiling water, the silk was then
sized and smoothed with a paddle. The use of silken fabric of the finest
weave, prepared with a thick sizing, became general during the Sung
dynasty. Papers were made of vegetable fibres, principally of bamboo.
Being prepared, as was the silk, with a sizing of alum, they became
practically indestructible. Upon these silks and papers the painter
worked with brush and Chinese ink,[1] color being introduced with more
or less freedom or restraint.
The brushes are of different types. Each position of the brush conforms
to a specific quality of the line, either sharp and precise or broad and
quivering, the ink spreading in strong touches or thinning to delicate
shades.
The colors are simple, of mineral or vegetable origin. Chinese painters
have always avoided mixing colors so far as possible. From malachite they
obtained several shades of green, from cinnabar or sulphide of mercury, a
number of reds. They knew also how to combine mercury, sulphur and potash
to produce vermilion. From peroxide of mercury they drew coloring powders
which furnished shades ranging from brick red to orange yellow. During the
T'ang dynasty coral was ground to secure a special red, while white was
extracted from burnt oyster shells. White lead was later substituted for
this lime white. Carmine lake they obtained from madder, yellows from
the sap of the rattan, blues from indigo. To these must be added the
different shades of Chinese ink and lastly, gold in leaf and in powder.
[1] Chinese ink is a very different composition from the ink of
Western countries. It is a solid made of soot obtained by burning
certain plants, which is then combined with glue or oil and moulded
into a cake and dried. Other ingredients may be added to produce sheen
or a dead finish. It improves with age if properly kept. The cake is
moistened and rubbed on a slab, and the ink thus obtained must be used
in a special way and with special care to produce the full
effect.--TRANSLATOR.
[Illustration: PLATE I. SCULPTURED STONES OF THE HAN DYNASTY
Second to Third Centuries. Rubbings taken by the Chavannes Expedition.]
The brush-stroke in the painting of the Far East is of supreme importance.
We know that this could not be otherwise if we recall that the characters
in Chinese writing are ideographs, not actually _written_, but rather
_drawn_. The stroke is not a mere formal, lifeless sign. It is an
expression in which is reflected the beauty of the thought that inspired
it as well as the quality of the soul of him who gives it form. In
writing, as in painting, it reveals to us the character and the conception
of its author. Placed at the service of certain philosophical ideas, which
will be set forth later on, this technique was bound to lead to a special
code of Aesthetics. The painter seeks to suggest with an unbroken line the
fundamental character of a form. His endeavor, in this respect, is to
simplify the objective images of the world to the extreme, replacing them
with ideal images, which prolonged meditation shall have freed from every
non-essential. It may therefore be readily understood how the brush-stroke
becomes so personal a thing, that in itself it serves to reveal the hand
of the master. There is no Chinese book treating of painting which does
not discuss and lay stress upon the value of its aesthetic code.