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Lot Essay
Attributed to Cui Zizhong , Washing the Elephant
Julia F. Andrews, Distinguished University Prof. of the History of Art Department, The Ohio State University
The seventeenth century Beijing artist Cui Zizhong (1597-1644), a native of Laiyang, Shandong, was renowned for the antique flavor of his eccentric figural compositions and believed to embody such qualities in his person and character1. He was a Confucian scholar who, like many aspiring officials in the last decades of the Ming, did not pass the jinshi examination to attain a government position but instead lived on his artistic talents. Cui Zizhong was closely allied with scholar-officials who unsuccessfully sought to restore effective rule to the declining Ming dynasty, and his death of starvation when the dynasty fell in 1644 is thought to offer tragic evidence of his stubborn virtue. The late Ming poet Qian Qianyi (1582-1664), who met him in 1638, wrote: “His appearance was pure and antique; his speech simple and unadorned. He didn’t look like a contemporary man, and his painting was also modelled on the ancients.”2 Critics of the time compared him favorably to a contemporary figure painter, Chen Hongshou, in the pairing “Nan Chen, Bei Cui” (Chen of the South, Cui of the North). Nevertheless, his surviving works, which date between 1622 and 1640, are rare, in part because some examples, like this painting, have been misattributed by later collectors to earlier masters.
Cui Zizhong’s paintings often take spiritual cleansing or purification as their theme. Among the religious and literary subjects for which he was known was the Buddhist-inspired “Washing the Elephant,” which he painted in numerous different versions, each with a slightly different setting or subsidiary figures. A signed version of the composition in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, with five figures and a white elephant assembled under a broad-leafed tree, is quite similar to the present painting3 (fig.1). The artist inscribed it with the claim that his version followed a Jin dynasty (265-419 c.e.) album of 53 leaves. A red-robed character, a string of prayer beads on one arm and a sword balanced on the other hand, with shoulder-length hair sweeping down from the bald protrusion on his pate, supervises two grooms who clean the elephant to his left. With his head tilted to his right, he seems unworldly and aloof. In Ming illustrations of this iconography, the figure is usually identified as the bodhisattva Manjusri, a personification of Buddhist wisdom. In addition to the oddly introverted facial expressions of the figures, the robes that envelop them are delineated with strangely mannered drapery strokes, evoking the “trembling brush” of painting masters of the distant past. The present painting is similar to the Taipei picture, with a bald, bearded figure at rear and a small, crowned figure who bows in homage before the bodhisattva, but expands the group by additional three figures: a second, white-robed bodhisattva, probably Samantabhadra; a boy hoisting a large alms bowl over his head; and a turbaned man holding a neatly tied pile of leaves, a sutra written on the exotic leaves found in the Buddhist homeland.
By way of further comparison, a monochromatic illustration to the Diamond Sutra painted by Cui in 1631, now in the Shanghai Museum, similarly features a Buddha with an egg-shaped cranial protrusion who is accompanied by an attendant bearing a bodhi-leaf sutra. The antique bronze vessels the grooms use to pour water on the elephant resemble those in a 1638 Cui Zizhong painting of Ni Zan Washing the Tong Tree in the National Palace Museum. The eccentric dark outlines of the tree branches and trunks, schematic ink shading, pinwheel shaped vegetation, and opaque blue and green in-painting of the leaves are comparable to those seen in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Xu Jingyang Ascending to Heaven (fig.2), another subject for which Cui was widely well-known. Moreover, although the main character of the Cleveland work, Xu Jingyang, is a Daoist immortal, the artist has depicted him in a red robe and right-leaning posture similar to the red-robed bodhisattva of Washing the Elephant. Finally, the progression of three trees at left of the painting suggests in rather schematic terms a grove that recedes into the distance. This compositional device resembles a more complex outdoor setting visible along the right edge of Cui’s latest dated painting, Appreciating Antiquities Under the Tong Tree of 1640 in the National Palace Museum. The latter work experiments further with crinkled drapery folds. On the basis of stylistic similarities to these and other works, this painting may be attributed to Cui Zizhong. Among firmly attributed versions of Washing the Elephant is another painting previously attributed to a Song master in the National Palace Museum 4. Hanging scroll paintings by Cui Zizhong are found in public collections in Taipei, Shanghai, Beijing, Cleveland, and Princeton. Examples of Cui’s Washing the Elephant composition may also be found in the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington 5.
This painting was exhibited in a major exhibition of more than 600 masterpieces of Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasty Chinese painting held at the Tokyo Prefectural Museum and Imperial Household Museum in the fall of 1928. The exhibition’s legacy is best-known today from its exhibition catalogue, Tō So Gen Min meiga taikan, which has served for almost a century as a valued reference book, and in which this painting was reproduced 6. A large delegation of Chinese collectors, including the prominent Shanghai publisher, collector, and lay Buddhist Di Baoxian (also known as Chuqing , Pingzi ; 1872-1941), travelled to Japan on the occasion of this comprehensive effort by Chinese cultural elites, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and Japanese temples and collections. The Japanese Empress Kōjun personally visited the exhibition on December 12, and its success led to extension of the closing date.
The exhibition catalogue credits the loan of this painting to Di Baoxian’s son Jingming and attributes it to an anonymous Song master. Di Baoxian, demonstrating his admiration for the painting, his dedication to Buddhist studies, and his support for the Tokyo exhibition, inscribed the mounting with highest praise, supplying the title and attribution under which it was catalogued: “Anonymous Song, Manjusri Washing the Elephant, highest (divine) class.” He wrote: “The brushwork of the drapery folds in this painting clearly resembles those of a Tang master. There are many Japanese who have painted Buddha and bodhisattva images that resemble this. Tang paintings still survive in Japan, but in our country are extremely rare. I [suspect ?] this painting is a Song artist’s copy of a Tang composition. Unfortunately, the artist’s signature was removed by the mounter, so there is no way to know who painted it.” At some time before it was shown in Japan, the work was indeed cut to remove the upper portion, where the artist’s inscription and signature are normally found, as well as the lower section, the usual location of seals of the artist and collectors. Cui Zizhong’s contemporaries considered his works to follow the great masters of the pre-Tang era, when foreign monks brought their marvelous styles to China. Their air of antiquity has led to this and several of his other paintings being misattributed to earlier artists.
1. For my 1984 attribution of the painting to Cui Zizhong, see “The Significance of Style and Subject Matter in the Painting of Cui Zizhong (d.1644),” University of California, Berkeley, 1984, pp. 190-191, pl. 82. At the time, I knew the image from the 1929 Japanese catalogue Tōsō genmin meiga taikan. Only slightly later did I learn that the painting happily survives and had the opportunity to see it in the original.
2.Qian Qianyi, Liechao shiji xiaozhuan, p. 533.
3.Cui Zizhong, Sweeping the Elephant, ink and color on silk, 166.1x50.5cm, NPM000656N000000000
4. James Cahill, The Distant Mountains (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1982) pls. 128-129. This composition is variously titled Sweeping the Elephant and Washing the Elephant .
5. For many of Cui’s paintings in the National Palace Museum, see Wan Ming bianxing zhuyi huajia zuopinzhan Style Transformed: A Special Exhibition of Works by Five Late Ming Artists (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1977). For those in the Shanghai Museum and Beijing Palace Museum, see Nan Chen Bei Cui: Gugong bowuyuan Shanghai bowuguan cang Chen Hongshou Cui Zizhong shuhuaji. Painting and Calligraphy of Chen Hongshou and Cui Zizhong from the Palace Museum and the Shanghai Museum (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2008. Also consult the museum websites.
6. Tōsō genmin meiga taikan (Catalogue of the Works of Chinese Master Painters held at Tokyo in the Art Gallery, November-December, 1928, under the auspices of the Japanese Government). Eds. Tōsō genmin meiga tenrankai. 2 vols. Tokyo: Ōtsuka Kōgeisha , 1929, pl. 134.
Julia F. Andrews, Distinguished University Prof. of the History of Art Department, The Ohio State University
The seventeenth century Beijing artist Cui Zizhong (1597-1644), a native of Laiyang, Shandong, was renowned for the antique flavor of his eccentric figural compositions and believed to embody such qualities in his person and character1. He was a Confucian scholar who, like many aspiring officials in the last decades of the Ming, did not pass the jinshi examination to attain a government position but instead lived on his artistic talents. Cui Zizhong was closely allied with scholar-officials who unsuccessfully sought to restore effective rule to the declining Ming dynasty, and his death of starvation when the dynasty fell in 1644 is thought to offer tragic evidence of his stubborn virtue. The late Ming poet Qian Qianyi (1582-1664), who met him in 1638, wrote: “His appearance was pure and antique; his speech simple and unadorned. He didn’t look like a contemporary man, and his painting was also modelled on the ancients.”2 Critics of the time compared him favorably to a contemporary figure painter, Chen Hongshou, in the pairing “Nan Chen, Bei Cui” (Chen of the South, Cui of the North). Nevertheless, his surviving works, which date between 1622 and 1640, are rare, in part because some examples, like this painting, have been misattributed by later collectors to earlier masters.
Cui Zizhong’s paintings often take spiritual cleansing or purification as their theme. Among the religious and literary subjects for which he was known was the Buddhist-inspired “Washing the Elephant,” which he painted in numerous different versions, each with a slightly different setting or subsidiary figures. A signed version of the composition in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, with five figures and a white elephant assembled under a broad-leafed tree, is quite similar to the present painting3 (fig.1). The artist inscribed it with the claim that his version followed a Jin dynasty (265-419 c.e.) album of 53 leaves. A red-robed character, a string of prayer beads on one arm and a sword balanced on the other hand, with shoulder-length hair sweeping down from the bald protrusion on his pate, supervises two grooms who clean the elephant to his left. With his head tilted to his right, he seems unworldly and aloof. In Ming illustrations of this iconography, the figure is usually identified as the bodhisattva Manjusri, a personification of Buddhist wisdom. In addition to the oddly introverted facial expressions of the figures, the robes that envelop them are delineated with strangely mannered drapery strokes, evoking the “trembling brush” of painting masters of the distant past. The present painting is similar to the Taipei picture, with a bald, bearded figure at rear and a small, crowned figure who bows in homage before the bodhisattva, but expands the group by additional three figures: a second, white-robed bodhisattva, probably Samantabhadra; a boy hoisting a large alms bowl over his head; and a turbaned man holding a neatly tied pile of leaves, a sutra written on the exotic leaves found in the Buddhist homeland.
By way of further comparison, a monochromatic illustration to the Diamond Sutra painted by Cui in 1631, now in the Shanghai Museum, similarly features a Buddha with an egg-shaped cranial protrusion who is accompanied by an attendant bearing a bodhi-leaf sutra. The antique bronze vessels the grooms use to pour water on the elephant resemble those in a 1638 Cui Zizhong painting of Ni Zan Washing the Tong Tree in the National Palace Museum. The eccentric dark outlines of the tree branches and trunks, schematic ink shading, pinwheel shaped vegetation, and opaque blue and green in-painting of the leaves are comparable to those seen in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Xu Jingyang Ascending to Heaven (fig.2), another subject for which Cui was widely well-known. Moreover, although the main character of the Cleveland work, Xu Jingyang, is a Daoist immortal, the artist has depicted him in a red robe and right-leaning posture similar to the red-robed bodhisattva of Washing the Elephant. Finally, the progression of three trees at left of the painting suggests in rather schematic terms a grove that recedes into the distance. This compositional device resembles a more complex outdoor setting visible along the right edge of Cui’s latest dated painting, Appreciating Antiquities Under the Tong Tree of 1640 in the National Palace Museum. The latter work experiments further with crinkled drapery folds. On the basis of stylistic similarities to these and other works, this painting may be attributed to Cui Zizhong. Among firmly attributed versions of Washing the Elephant is another painting previously attributed to a Song master in the National Palace Museum 4. Hanging scroll paintings by Cui Zizhong are found in public collections in Taipei, Shanghai, Beijing, Cleveland, and Princeton. Examples of Cui’s Washing the Elephant composition may also be found in the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington 5.
This painting was exhibited in a major exhibition of more than 600 masterpieces of Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasty Chinese painting held at the Tokyo Prefectural Museum and Imperial Household Museum in the fall of 1928. The exhibition’s legacy is best-known today from its exhibition catalogue, Tō So Gen Min meiga taikan, which has served for almost a century as a valued reference book, and in which this painting was reproduced 6. A large delegation of Chinese collectors, including the prominent Shanghai publisher, collector, and lay Buddhist Di Baoxian (also known as Chuqing , Pingzi ; 1872-1941), travelled to Japan on the occasion of this comprehensive effort by Chinese cultural elites, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and Japanese temples and collections. The Japanese Empress Kōjun personally visited the exhibition on December 12, and its success led to extension of the closing date.
The exhibition catalogue credits the loan of this painting to Di Baoxian’s son Jingming and attributes it to an anonymous Song master. Di Baoxian, demonstrating his admiration for the painting, his dedication to Buddhist studies, and his support for the Tokyo exhibition, inscribed the mounting with highest praise, supplying the title and attribution under which it was catalogued: “Anonymous Song, Manjusri Washing the Elephant, highest (divine) class.” He wrote: “The brushwork of the drapery folds in this painting clearly resembles those of a Tang master. There are many Japanese who have painted Buddha and bodhisattva images that resemble this. Tang paintings still survive in Japan, but in our country are extremely rare. I [suspect ?] this painting is a Song artist’s copy of a Tang composition. Unfortunately, the artist’s signature was removed by the mounter, so there is no way to know who painted it.” At some time before it was shown in Japan, the work was indeed cut to remove the upper portion, where the artist’s inscription and signature are normally found, as well as the lower section, the usual location of seals of the artist and collectors. Cui Zizhong’s contemporaries considered his works to follow the great masters of the pre-Tang era, when foreign monks brought their marvelous styles to China. Their air of antiquity has led to this and several of his other paintings being misattributed to earlier artists.
1. For my 1984 attribution of the painting to Cui Zizhong, see “The Significance of Style and Subject Matter in the Painting of Cui Zizhong (d.1644),” University of California, Berkeley, 1984, pp. 190-191, pl. 82. At the time, I knew the image from the 1929 Japanese catalogue Tōsō genmin meiga taikan. Only slightly later did I learn that the painting happily survives and had the opportunity to see it in the original.
2.Qian Qianyi, Liechao shiji xiaozhuan, p. 533.
3.Cui Zizhong, Sweeping the Elephant, ink and color on silk, 166.1x50.5cm, NPM000656N000000000
4. James Cahill, The Distant Mountains (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1982) pls. 128-129. This composition is variously titled Sweeping the Elephant and Washing the Elephant .
5. For many of Cui’s paintings in the National Palace Museum, see Wan Ming bianxing zhuyi huajia zuopinzhan Style Transformed: A Special Exhibition of Works by Five Late Ming Artists (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1977). For those in the Shanghai Museum and Beijing Palace Museum, see Nan Chen Bei Cui: Gugong bowuyuan Shanghai bowuguan cang Chen Hongshou Cui Zizhong shuhuaji. Painting and Calligraphy of Chen Hongshou and Cui Zizhong from the Palace Museum and the Shanghai Museum (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2008. Also consult the museum websites.
6. Tōsō genmin meiga taikan (Catalogue of the Works of Chinese Master Painters held at Tokyo in the Art Gallery, November-December, 1928, under the auspices of the Japanese Government). Eds. Tōsō genmin meiga tenrankai. 2 vols. Tokyo: Ōtsuka Kōgeisha , 1929, pl. 134.