Word: ming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Emperor Ming Huang was also a great lover of nature. Homesick for mountains, he one day ordered two of his painters to reproduce the scenery of the Kialing Valley. Artist Wu Tao-tzu went out to lie under the trees, listen to the murmuring streams. Then, having identified himself with the scene, he took his brush, dashed off One Hundred Miles of the Kialing River Valley in a single day. Artist Li Ssu-hsun, who was also a general in the Emperor's army, labored for long months to depict the same scene. Presented to the Emperor, both paintings...
...rare, 1,000-year-old painting on silk, is believed to be his. Done in metallic blues and greens, it creates a panorama of cloud-shrouded peaks and gorges against which is shown a group of horsemen and camels, led by a red-coated figure that may be Emperor Ming Huang himself. In the foreground, pack asses roll in the grass, while the column winds slowly ahead in a procession that ushers into Chinese art the great theme of the all-engulfing landscape...
Ground Rubies & Nutmegs. The national uprising that finally drove the Mongol troops north of the Great Wall and installed a young peasant on the throne as the first Ming Emperor in 1368 rapidly produced an epicurean age of elegance, not unlike that which marked the courts of Europe in the 18th century. The great pottery works of the Sung emperors were revived and expanded. For Emperor Hsuan-te's Dragon Soup Bowl, craftsmen ground rubies to powder to achieve richness of color; court ladies dipped their fingers into exquisite candy dishes for the cardamoms and nutmegs that served...
With ten centuries of accumulated art to look back over, Ming masters became eclectics, painting in several different styles. The mark of the age was its delight in intimate, everyday scenes, anecdotal and often merely decorative. But with the custom of copying from old masters, along with an absorption in technique for its own sake, art came perilously close to feeding upon itself. The famed three-volume painting primer called The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, compiled between 1679 and 1701 in a small Nanking house (called the Mustard Seed Garden), broke down brush strokes into 16 different categories...
...civil-service exam (he came out first, then was disgraced when it was discovered that a friend had bribed the examiner), was spent between wild roistering and intense painting periods. His Gentleman and Attendants borrows T'ang Dynasty props, slims down the earlier plump models to suit Ming tastes, and comes off as a triumph in space and contrasts. But T'ang Yin could not resist slyly mocking the mood of scholarly repose. On the painting he wrote: "Miss Li Tuan-tuan of the House of Shan Ho is indeed a walking flower. In spite...