When is a landscape more than a landscape? This is a richly illustrated
study of an important genre of Ming-dynasty Chinese painting in which
landscapes are actually disguised portraits that celebrate an individual
and his achievements, ambitions, and tastes in an open effort to win
recognition, support, and social status. In this unique study, Anne de
Coursey Clapp presents a broad view of these commemorative landscape
paintings, including antecedents in the Song and Yuan dynasties.
The book traces how in commemorative landscape painting members of the
literati address their peers in a deeply familiar language of values,
just as they had for centuries through literary biography. Although the
setting for such pictures is always natural landscape, it is secondary
to the man, and its true function is to mirror him as the humanistic
ideal of the recluse-scholar. The book shows how the literary
associations attached to the new landscape increased during the Yuan
dynasty (1271-1368), when the first commemorative paintings appeared,
and flourished through the Ming (1368-1644), producing an art form that
was simultaneously pictorial and verbal. In the course of exploring the
sources and meaning of these paintings, the book examines several
varieties of dedicatory paintings, including departure paintings, and
the interesting subgenre of "biehao," in which portrait subjects are
symbolized through pictorial representations of their literary names.