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Celebration by the River:

Formerly Attributed to Zhao Mengfu

by

Richard M. Barnhart

In 1947 the Claremont Colleges acquired a group of old Chinese paintings that had

been owned by General Johan Wilhelm Normann Munthe (1864-1935) and other

early collectors of Chinese art long resident in China such as Dr. William B. Pettus

(b. 1880?).1 Most of these paintings seem to have been acquired in China between

1909 and 1929. Among them is a hanging scroll on silk done in the classical Li

Cheng-Guo Xi style of the Song dynasty (960-1279) with an inscribed poem in the

upper right corner bearing the signature and seal of the distinguished scholar and

artist Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) (fig. 1). On the end of one porcelain roller is a

carefully written Chinese notation that identifies the painter as 趙文敏 Zhao

Wenmin, and gives the title of this painting as 如江賀 Rujianghe, which seems to

mean something like “Celebration by the River” (fig. 2). To the right of the artist’s

name in this catalog-like inscription are three characters reading 山水餘 shanshui

yu, which could be read as meaning left-over landscape, in the way later writers

sometimes criticized the “left-over” one-corner landscape paintings of the Southern

Song court, but more likely simply means “surplus landscape painting.” It appears to

be a collector-dealer’s catalogue notation providing the name of the painter, the title

of the work, and its general category as a landscape painting – and, in this case,

perhaps indicating that it was surplus to be sold.

I don’t know exactly how to understand the title given on the roller end either, but it

clearly refers to the central theme or story of the painting, and could be derived

directly from the subject matter the owner read into the work, if not from an earlier

title. Depicted in fine detail in the center foreground, a small family celebration is

taking place on the nearby riverbank as a fisherman steps from his small boat with

fish in hand while being greeted by his wife – who reaches out to take the fish he

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extends - and by a child, who runs happily toward him from the right (fig. 3). Partly

visible along the right edge is their home; and another thatched residence lies

further into the picture’s space. The nature of this foreground activity seems clear

enough, and there is further reason to read the three figures and physical activities

in the painting precisely this way because that is how they are read in the poem

written at the top of the painting (fig. 4), which is transcribed and translated as

follows:

晚來收釣艇，

且喜得魚歸。

妻子欣相慶，

溪源魚政肥。

At evening he brings in the boat,

Happy to return with fish.

Wife and child share his happiness,

For the fish upstream are nice and fat!

This simple poem seems somehow inseparable from the painting itself, which

otherwise now shows no clear sign of an author in the form of a signature or seal. It

can, I think, be understood to reflect the ideas of both the writer and the painter, and

identifies the fisherman as the father, the approaching adult as his wife, and the

running child as the son of this couple. Written in an easy, relaxed hand, the poem is

signed Zi’ang ti, “inscribed by Zi’ang.” Zi’ang being the zi or alternate name of Zhao

Mengfu, the most influential artist in China around 1300. Usually, when Zhao added

the character ti, or “inscribed,” to his inscriptions, it signified that he was writing on

the work of someone else, although there is at least one notable example of such a

usage on his own works. Two self-inscriptions on or attached to Zhao’s Mounted

Official of 1296 use the verb ti, indicating that there were exceptions in the more

common use of ti only when inscribing the work of others.2

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Directly beneath the last character of the inscription the faint traces of a seal remain.

With assistance it can just barely be read as Zhao Zi’ang shi, a version of the familiar

square seal used by Zhao frequently in such circumstances. He used one or another

seal with this legend so often that he owned many versions of it, differing only

slightly in size and detail.3

While the painting in its present physical condition is otherwise unsigned, it self-

identifies clearly enough in style, brushwork, composition, and physical character to

take its place as part of a small set of similar landscape paintings dated from 1323 to

1334 and signed by Tang Di (1287-1355), a disciple of Zhao Mengfu and well-known

practitioner of the Li-Guo style during the Yuan period. James Cahill’s brief

description of Tang Di’s style captures it perfectly:

His extant paintings are mostly hanging scrolls painted on silk and typically

set a group of tall foreground trees against a broad expanse of river and

shore, marked by tree clusters of diminishing size and ending in low hills…

The trees in his paintings, with their crab-claw branches and spidery pattern

of twigs, along with the scalloped contours of earth masses, give a rococolike

decorative quality to his style. The…sense of animation in Tang Di’s pictures

is typically accentuated by figures engaged in some seminarrative activity.4

In the company of Tang Di’s signed and dated compositions of 1323 (Metropolitan

Museum, fig. 5) and 1334 (Shanghai Museum, fig. 6), and his signed but undated

River Landscape in the National Palace Museum (fig. 7), Celebration by the River fits

like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. And since Zhao Mengfu died in 1322, his

inscription, if genuine, would date the painting at least one year earlier than any

other known work by Tang Di. Surprisingly, despite the well-documented

relationship between Zhao Mengfu and Tang Di, there are no other extant paintings

combining the work of the two men (as far as we know at present), and the Scripps

painting gains a further interesting association if the authenticity of these features

can be confirmed.

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We may note, then, that the only possible inauthentic element on Celebration by the

River in its present condition would be the inscription with purported signature and

seal of Zhao Mengfu, since the painting itself, even in Zhao’s colophon, does not

identify a maker. This inscription is written freely and loosely, in a manner

sometimes approaching caoshu or cursive writing. Some contemporary authorities

have reportedly judged it to be a forgery,5 but I think the real problem lies in the

differences that have emerged among modern connoisseurs more widely in recent

years concerning Zhao Mengfu’s late calligraphy. This period of Zhao’s life has

proven to be particularly difficult to understand, and controversy has been

especially acute in the case of his fairly rare calligraphy written on silk, as in the

Scripps College painting. For example, a bold and freely written poem on silk

written on a large scale as a hanging scroll, formerly in the collection of John M.

Crawford, Jr., and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was judged by Wen Fong

to be a rare large-scale work from the artist’s late period, written after his final

retirement to Wuxing in 1319 (fig. 8).6 Now, however, following trends in

contemporary connoisseurship, the museum considers the work to be a forgery

made sometime during the Ming dynasty.7 Similarly, the only other large-scale work

of this kind, a hanging scroll on silk in the Xinxiang County Museum, was judged to

be a Ming forgery by two members of the distinguished authentication group in

China, while Liu Jiu’an, the third member present, considered it genuine (fig. 9).8

The inscription on Celebration by the River is similar in style to both of these

writings, and it is therefore not surprising that it could arouse similar controversy.

Though I have not seen the Xinxiang County example, all three may well be genuine.

The identity of Tang Di as author of Celebration by the River is revealed in its details

of drawing and composition, from the broad river landscape to the characteristics of

brushwork in the depiction of rocks and trees, and in the vividly professional

depiction of figures, as we have already noted. Tang Di had a long official career as

an official and painter. He painted walls for the imperial court and large hanging

scrolls for the offices of high officials, while serving in a variety of bureaucratic posts

in which he quietly gained a reputation among his colleagues for his decency,

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efficiency, and honesty. Zhao Mengfu’s well-documented relationship with his

fellow-townsman Tang Di is attested to by several writers of the period, and is not in

doubt. Recently however Shih Shou-chien has questioned whether the extant works

of Tang Di offer any real evidence of their artistic relationship, and suggests that

they do not. Shih’s study of Tang Di is the most complete we have, and firmly fixes

his dates.9

Shane McCausland, in his recent monographic study of Zhao Mengfu, describes the

artist’s declining health in his last few years, following both the death of his beloved

wife in 1319 and his final return to his old home in Wuxing, where his own health

declined rapidly until his death in 1322.10 This is the time when he would have

written the inscription on Celebration by the River. McCausland implies that Zhao

may have worked closely at this time with some of his family members and his circle

of disciples or menren, which included Tang Di, in fulfilling the many obligations his

reputation accrued, and which his declining health made more and more difficult for

him to satisfy alone. Returning Fisherman, among other things, could suggest that

one way the aging master may have indirectly acknowledged such assistance was by

inscribing a little, informal poem on the work of his disciple. This would have had

the effect of both recommending his protégé and adding value to his work.

Another possible way of understanding all of the elements of Celebration by the

River would be to see it as the purported work of Zhao Mengfu actually painted by

one of his ghost painters or daibi, namely, the young Tang Di, in fulfillment of yet

another request for a painting by the aging master. I mention this possibility while

finding it implausible, if only because even today it is so easy to distinguish between

the styles of Tang Di and Zhao Mengfu. If Tang were trying to emulate his master he

could certainly have done it more convincingly.

We must presume that there were certain courtesies and unspoken niceties

involved when Zhao Mengfu inscribed the work of his contemporaries, especially

younger painters, although we have no certain knowledge of what they may have

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been. Judging from extant works, such activity was rather rare, making

generalizations difficult, so I do not know if it is significant that Tang Di’s earliest

extant dated painting was not done until 1323, the year after Zhao Mengfu’s death. It

does seems curious that Zhao does not mention the name of any painter in his

inscription on Celebration by the River; that would make sense to me only if the

painter was unknown to Zhao Mengfu – which does not seem possible – or if there

were already some mark of the painter on the scroll, which leads me to guess that

there was originally at least a seal and perhaps a small signature of Tang Di along

one of the edges of the painting. The placement of Zhao Mengfu’s inscription so close

to the present upper edge of the silk alone strongly suggests substantial trimming,

as does the cutting off of details in the lower right corner. Some of Tang’s large river

landscapes, such as the undated River Landscape in the National Palace Museum (fig.

7) have relatively small signature-seal documentation close to an edge (here the

lower right corner) that could easily have been trimmed off.

Yet another explanation, of course, would be that a later owner of the painting may

have realized that this painting by the relatively minor and unimportant Tang Di

could easily be made into an infinitely more valuable Zhao Mengfu simply by

removing the painter’s signature, leaving the signed and sealed inscription by Zhao

Mengfu to identify the painter. This is the explanation I find most likely. Celebration

by the River was acquired in China at the height of the first great era of the

international passion for early Chinese paintings between 1890 and 1930, a period

when world-wide demand for classical old paintings such as those of Zhao Mengfu

was at a fever pitch. Charles Lang Freer acquired over twenty paintings attributed to

Zhao before his death in 1919; Dubois Schanck Morris brought eight paintings

attributed to Zhao Mengfu back from China in 1928; and there are others bearing his

name in the Scripps College collection.

Tang Di’s oeuvre is uneven, like the other Yuan followers of the Li-Guo tradition.

Some of his large-scale landscapes have a perfunctory look, as if done almost

mechanically, and at least once he used stencils for figure groups, repeating the

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same group in slightly different settings.11 His pine trees are done according to

simple formulas, perhaps as they were taught to him by Zhao Mengfu along with the

typical cloud-like rock shapes that Zhao taught his students. His fishermen groups

have the look of a band of brothers, although the happy fisherman had long-since

become a convention with little necessary connection to reality.

What initially seems most striking about Tang Di’s finer river landscapes such as the

Scripps College painting is their breadth of vision, even though this too was a

convention made common by the river landscapes of the Guo Xi tradition as it

evolved through the Song period into the Yuan. Zhao Mengfu was of course an

influential practitioner and teacher of this tradition, among others. Unsurprisingly,

Tang Di has not been the subject of widespread modern acclaim, and in fact has

generally been regarded lightly by contemporary writers – including the present

writer.12 Why, then, take so much pleasure at finding yet another conventional

painting by a minor artist of the 14th century? There is, of course, a certain

satisfaction in finding any unpublished work by a known painter who lived and

worked in China some eight hundred years ago, but, then, quite some time after I

arrived at my own understanding of Celebration by the River I came across James

Cahill’s precise characterization of the painting, included in his 1985 Index of

Chinese paintings: “Good Yuan work in the style of T’ang Ti; possibly by him.”13 This

put my so-called “discovery” into better perspective, but also reassured me that at

least one other scholar saw the painting as I do, and found the discovery of another

Yuan paintings by a second-rank artist as rewarding as I do.

Perhaps I am over-reading, but I am drawn to the painter’s focus on the vividly-

depicted human activity at the center of the Scripps College painting, and the

seeming understanding between the choices made by the painter and the reading of

the image made by the writer of the poetic inscription – or I would simply say,

between the elderly Zhao Mengfu and the young Tang Di. Zhao, who was either

there when the painting was done or saw it in the hands of his young protégé, read

it simply as a representation of the nuclear family: father, mother, child; in other

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words as an image of the laobaixing, the old hundred names, the common people

living their workaday lives as ever. This little family is the center of their world,

along the margins of China’s rivers and lakes.

Tang Di’s river family, so happy to have found fresh fish for their dinner, presents an

interesting contrast to the remote sense of human lives lived among the vast spaces

suggested in the landscape tradition within which Tang Di grew up. One of the most

beautiful examples of that tradition is a large, anonymous painting in the National

Palace Museum known as Waiting for a Ferry by Wintry Groves, Hanlin daidu tu, a

work of monumental scope described by James Cahill as a “Fine Chin or early Yuan

work in the Kuo Hsi tradition”(fig. 10).14 This broad river landscape also contains

families, homes, and travelers, but they very nearly disappear within the endless

spaces and nuanced atmospheric perspective used so effectively by the unknown

painter. This painter was still working within the parameters of the Song and Jin

traditions of Li Cheng and Guo Xi, and probably in northern China instead of Wuxing.

Waiting for a Ferry may be among the last of such superb evocations of the great

universe made in the tradition of Song monumental landscape painting. Ironically,

given the vast scope of the Mongol empire, for southern Chinese scholars such as

Zhao Mengfu and Tang Di the great physical universe no longer held the same

meanings it once had. The small universe of nuclear family and ancestors became

the center of everything Zhao Mengfu cherished and taught, in his life as in his art. A

plausible illusion of space and atmosphere disappeared from Chinese painting at

about the same time.

Thus, in Tang Di’s Celebration by the River, it is the small group constituting father,

mother, and child sharing their excitement at having fresh-caught fish for dinner

that occupies the center of our attention, emphasized for us by the simple poem

Zhao Mengfu inscribed on the painting, which is only about a family and its dinner.

These ideals still lingered in the mind of Wu Zhen when he painted his Fisherman on

Lake Dongting in 1341 and ended his poem about fishing with the line, “He fishes

only for perch, not fame.”15 There is of course a great deal more at issue than fresh

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fish and the lives of a small family in any painting done by a Chinese scholar-official

living during the century-long rule of the Mongols over China. Zhao Mengfu himself

first made us think of that fisherman, living in a country ruled by Mongol tribesmen,

when he painted his Twin Pines, Level Distance, now in the Metropolitan Museum of

Art (fig. 11). Zhao’s remote, isolated fisherman lives somewhere else, at least in his

mind. It is the inner spaces of the mind that now create the depths of Chinese

painting.

My thanks to professors Bai Qianshen of Zhejiang University and Bruce Coats of

Scripps College.

1 A very attractive catalogue of thirty-four of these paintings, all recently cleaned and remounted, is published as Preserving China’s Past: Paintings of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, 2015). 2 Reproduced in James Cahill et al, Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (Yale University Press, 1997), fig. 136. 3 Nine of them are reproduced in Victoria Contag and Wang Chi-ch’ien, Seals of Chinese Painters and Collectors of the Ming and Ch’ing Periods (Revised edition, Hong Kong University Press, 1966), pp. 525 and 711. 4 Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (as in n. 2), pp. 161-2. 5 According to faculty and staff at the gallery, informally. 6 Wen Fong, Beyond Representation (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 425-7. 7 According to information provided on the museum’s website, under Zhao Mengfu. 8 Zhongguo Gudai Shuhua Tumu (Beijing, 1986 -), vol. 8, p. 112. 9 Shih Shou-chien, “Tang Di (1287-1355) and the Development of the Li-Guo Style in the Yuan Dynasty” (in Chinese), Meishuyanjiu, no. 5 (March, 1991), pp. 83-131. 10 Shane McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China (Hong Kong University Press, 2011), pp. 369-370. 11 For these paintings, dated 1338 in the National Palace Museum, and 1342, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Wen Fong, Beyond Representation, pp. 408-412. 12 Richard M. Barnhart, Along the Border of Heaven: Sung and Yuan Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), pp. 124-126. 13 James Cahill, An Index of Chinese Painters and Paintings: T’ang, Sung, and Yuan (University of California Press, 1980), p. 331. 14 Ibid., 202. 15 Reproduced in Gugong Shuhua Tulu (Taipei, National Palace Museum, 1991?), pp. 163-4.

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List of illustrations

Fig1. Celebration by the River (Rujianghe), formerly attributed to Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322). Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College. Hanging scroll, ink and slight color on silk, 135.1 x 67.31 cm.

Fig2. Detail of fig. 1. Inscription on roller end.

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Fig3. Detail of fig. 1. Figures in foreground.

Fig 4. Detail of fig. 1. Poem by Zhao Mengfu.

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Fig 5. Tang Di (1297-1355), Painting after Wang Wei’s Poem, dated 1323. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on silk. 128.9 x 69.2 cm. Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, 1985. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fig 6. Tang Di, Drinking Party in the Shade of Pines, dated 1334. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. 141.1 x 97.1 cm. Shanghai Museum. .

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Fig 7. Tang Di, River Landscape. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on silk. 133.4 x 86.5 cm. The National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Fig 8. Zhao Mengfu, A Summer Idyll, after 1319. Hanging scroll, ink on silk. 134.3 x 53 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford, Jr., 1988. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fig 9. Zhao Mengfu, Poem by Du Fu. Hanging scroll, ink on silk. 128 x 47 cm. Xinxiang Museum, Henan Province.

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Fig 10. Anon., Waiting for the Ferry by a Wintry Grove. 13th century? Hanging scroll, ink on silk. 136.8 x 99.7 cm. The National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Fig 11. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance. Handscroll, ink on paper. 26.9 x 107.4 cm. Gift of the Dillon Fund, 1973. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Section.