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Lot Essay
Bai Juyi’s Song of the Pipa (Pipa xing) begins on an autumn night by the river, where the unexpected sound of a pipa transforms an ordinary farewell into an encounter between two kindred spirits in exile. Fu Baoshi translates this celebrated literary episode into a richly evocative image: the pipa player sits alone in a boat beneath the autumn moon, surrounded by maple leaves rendered in dark ink, ochre and vermilion. The composition evokes the poem’s imagery of “maple leaves and reed flowers in the autumn wind,” bringing together landscape, music and emotion. The pipa player, with her rounded features, delicate expression and fluent line, recalls the elegance of Tang-dynasty court ladies (fig. 1). Characteristic of Fu’s figure paintings of the 1940s, the work combines Jin- and Tang-inspired imagery with expressive brushwork, broken strokes and dry-brush lines, lending the classical figure both refinement and vitality.
Fu’s transformation of tradition was also shaped by his exposure to Japanese painting during his years in Japan. The present work may be compared with a 1935 painting by Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958) (fig. 2), particularly in the arrangement of the figure and surrounding scenery, as well as in the handling of colour, space and atmosphere. Fu was in contact with Yokoyama at the time, and these visual affinities offer a valuable clue to his synthesis of Chinese and Japanese pictorial experience. Painted in the autumn of 1945, The Song of the Pipa is notable for its unusually vivid and sumptuous palette, rare among Fu’s paintings of lady. Created just after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, its luminous colouring may be read as reflecting a broader passage from wartime darkness towards renewal. Fu’s own wartime displacement in Sichuan further deepens the resonance of Bai Juyi’s themes of exile and unexpected human connection. The painting was exhibited in Fu Baoshi: A Master of Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting at the Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo, in October 1999, where it was acquired by the present owner and has remained in the same collection ever since.
Fu’s transformation of tradition was also shaped by his exposure to Japanese painting during his years in Japan. The present work may be compared with a 1935 painting by Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958) (fig. 2), particularly in the arrangement of the figure and surrounding scenery, as well as in the handling of colour, space and atmosphere. Fu was in contact with Yokoyama at the time, and these visual affinities offer a valuable clue to his synthesis of Chinese and Japanese pictorial experience. Painted in the autumn of 1945, The Song of the Pipa is notable for its unusually vivid and sumptuous palette, rare among Fu’s paintings of lady. Created just after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, its luminous colouring may be read as reflecting a broader passage from wartime darkness towards renewal. Fu’s own wartime displacement in Sichuan further deepens the resonance of Bai Juyi’s themes of exile and unexpected human connection. The painting was exhibited in Fu Baoshi: A Master of Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting at the Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo, in October 1999, where it was acquired by the present owner and has remained in the same collection ever since.