The Chinese divide the subjects of painting into four principal classes,
as follows:
Landscape.
Man and Objects.
Flowers and Birds.
Plants and Insects.
Nowhere do we see a predominant place assigned to the drawing or painting
of the human figure. This alone is sufficient to mark the wide difference
between Chinese and European painting.
The exact name for _Landscape_ is translated by the words _mountain and
water picture_. They recall the ancient conception of Creation on which
the Oriental system of the world is founded. The mountain exemplifies the
teeming life of the earth. It is threaded by veins wherein waters
continuously flow. Cascades, brooks and torrents are the outward evidence
of this inner travail. By its own superabundance of life, it brings forth
clouds and arrays itself in mists, thus being a manifestation of the two
principles which rule the life of the universe.
The second class, _Man and Objects_, must be understood principally as
concerning man, his works, his belongings, and, in a general sense, all
things created by the hand of man, in combination with landscape. This was
the convention in early times when the first painters whose artistic
purpose can be formulated with certainty, portrayed the history of the
legendary beings of Taoism,--the genii and fairies dwelling amidst an
imaginary Nature. The records tell us, to be sure, that the early masters
painted portraits, but it was at a later period that _Man and Objects_
composed a class distinct from _Landscape_, a period responsible for those
ancestral portraits painted after death, which are almost always
attributable to ordinary artisans. Earlier they endeavored to apply to
figure painting the methods, technique and laws established for an
ensemble in which the thought of nature predominated. Special rules
bearing on this subject are sometimes found of a very early date but there
is no indication that they were collected into a definite system until the
end of the seventeenth century. Up to the present time our only knowledge
of their content is through a small treatise published at the beginning of
the nineteenth century.
The third class, _Flowers and Birds_, deals with those paintings wherein
the Chinese gave rein to their fancy for painting the bird in conjunction
with the plant life associated with its home and habits. The bird is
treated with a full understanding of its life, and flowers are studied
with such a comprehension of their essential structure that a botanist
can readily detect the characteristics typical of a species, despite the
simplifications which an artist always imposes on the complexity of forms.
[Illustration: PLATE IV. PALACE OF KIU CHENG-KUNG BY LI CHAO-TAO
T'ang Period. Collection of V. Goloubew.]
This general class is subdivided. The epidendrum, the iris, the orchis
and the chrysanthemum became special studies each of which had its own
masters, both from the standpoint of painting itself, and of the
application of the aesthetic rules which govern this art. The bamboo and
the plum tree are also allied to this class. Under the influence of
philosophic and symbolic ideas they furnished a special category of
subjects to the imagination of the painter and form a division apart which
has its own laws and methods, regarding which the Chinese treatises on
Aesthetics inform us fully.
Finally, the fourth class, _Plants and Insects_, is based upon the same
conception as that of _Flowers and Birds_. The insect is represented with
the plant which is his habitat when in the stage of caterpillar and larva,
or flying above the flowers and plants upon which he subsists on reaching
the stage of butterfly and insect. Certain books add to this fourth class
a subdivision comprising fishes.
Lastly we must note that in the Far East, as in Europe, there is a special
class to be taken into consideration, _Religious paintings_. In China,
this refers almost exclusively to Buddhist paintings.