ZHANG DAQIAN / 張大千 (1899-1983)
Emeishan / 峨眉山 (3,099m - 10, 167ft)
China
1. In Mount Emei of Sichuan, Ink and color on paper, 1953, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2. In Three gentlemen in Emeishan, Ink and color on paper, 1946, Private collection
3. In Emeishan, wall painting in the Emei Train station, China
The mountain
Emeishan / 峨眉山 or Mount Emei (3,099 -10, 167ft) is a mountain in Sichuan Province, China. It is the highest of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China, traditionally regarded as the bodhimaṇḍa, or place of enlightenment, of the bodhisattva Samantabhadra as Pǔxián Púsà. Sources of the 16th and 17th centuries allude to the practice of martial arts in the monasteries of Mount Emei made the earliest extant reference to the Shaolin Monastery as Chinese boxing's place of origin.
Mt. Emei sits at the western rim of the Sichuan Basin. The mountains west of it are known as Daxiangling. A large surrounding area of countryside is geologically known as the Permian Emeishan Large Igneous Province, a large igneous province generated by the Emeishan Traps volcanic eruptions during the Permian Period. Administratively, Mt. Emei is located near the county-level city of the same name (Emeishan City), which is in turn part of the prefecture-level city of Leshan. It was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
Mount Emei is the location of the first Buddhist temple built in China in the 1st century CE. The site has 76 Buddhist monasteries of the Ming and Qing period, most of them located near the mountain top. The monasteries demonstrate a flexible architectural style that adapts to the landscape. Some, such as the halls of Baoguosi, are built on terraces of varying levels, while others, including the structures of Leiyinsi, are on raised stilts. Here the fixed plans of Buddhist monasteries of earlier periods were modified or ignored in order to make full use of the natural scenery. The buildings of Qingyinge are laid out in an irregular plot on the narrow piece of land between the Black Dragon River and the White Dragon River. The site is large and the winding foot path is 50 km (31 mi), taking several days to walk.Great spectacles of Mount Emei include the sunrise and Clouds Sea seen from the Golden Summit of the mountain. The sunrise is very varied, but optimally begins with the ground and sky being in the same dark purple, soon showing rosy clouds, followed by a bright purple arc and then a semicircle where the sun is coming up. The Clouds Sea includes several cloud phenomena, e.g. clouds appearing in the sky above, in addition to the regular clouds beneath.
The painter
Zhang Daqian / 張大千 or Chang Dai-chien was one of the best-known and most prodigious Chinese artists of the twentieth century. Originally known as a guohua (traditionalist) painter, by the 1960s he was also renowned as a modern impressionist and expressionist painter.
Zhang's early professional painting was primarily in Shanghai. In the late 1920s he moved to Beijing where he collaborated with Pu Xinyu. In the 1930s he worked out of a studio on the grounds of the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou. In 1940 he led a group of artists in copying the Buddhist wall paintings in the Mogao and Yulin caves. In the late 1950s, his deteriorating eyesight led him to develop his splashed color, or pocai, style.
In addition, Zhang Daqian is regarded as one of the most gifted master forgers of the twentieth century (a traditional categorie of Chinese art of painting). Zhang's forgeries are difficult to detect for many reasons. First, his ability to mimic the great Chinese masters. Second, he paid scrupulous attention to the materials he used. "He studied paper, ink, brushes, pigments, seals, seal paste, and scroll mountings in exacting detail. When he wrote an inscription on a painting, he sometimes included a postscript describing the type of paper, the age and the origin of the ink, or the provenance of the pigments he had used." Third, he often forged paintings based on descriptions in catalogues of lost paintings; his forgeries came with ready-made provenance.
Zhang's forgeries have been purchased as original paintings by several major art museums in the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Of particular interest is a master forgery acquired by the Museum in 1957 as an authentic work of the tenth century. The painting, which was allegedly a landscape by the Five Dynasties period master Guan Tong, is one of Zhang’s most ambitious forgeries and serves to illustrate both his skill and his audacity. James Cahill, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Art at the University of California, Berkeley, claimed that the painting The Riverbank, a masterpiece from the Southern Tang Dynasty, held by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, was likely another Zhang forgery.
Sources:
- The Cultural Affairs Bureau of Macao
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston