After Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

Zhang Yingjun is a relatively unknown painter whose works are scarce today. He was probably active in the late Qianlong and early Jiaqing eras. The book “Luyuan huaxue” records him as having the sobriquet Dongyu, hailing from Changzhou, and serving in Sichuan as a minor official. Later he arrived in Beijing and befriended Dong Bangda (1699–1769). (See Qian Yong, “Luyuan huaxue,” 8. For more information, see Oertling, “Chinese Paintings from the Henricksen Collection,” 38–39.)Though this artist was little-known, his paintings must have been fine enough for him to become Dong Bangda’s “substitute brush” (ghost painter). He studied the Southern school, the most popular painting style during the Qing dynasty, and he based this work on Huang Gongwang’s magnum opus “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” (National Palace Museum, Taipei). Compared with Huang’s painting, Zhang’s work is not a direct copy, but rather, as Zhang indicated, he was using Huang’s method. This is quite different from Zheng Min’s copy of Huang Gongwang’s “Panoramic View of Mountains and Rivers.” Both works indicated the lasting influence of the late-Yuan master. Wang Xuehao’s colophon, mounted after the painting, points out that the Four Wangs all studied Huang Gongwang, and Zhang Yingjun’s scroll shows that not only had he mastered the method of composition, which was easy to grasp, but that he had obtained the ideas of austere antiquity, which were difficult to grasp. The scroll reveals Dong Qichang’s Southern school historical vision as the painting framework. Zhang had selected methods of painting and style from the past and assembled them into what Dong Qichang emphasized as “ink mountains-and-water.” The foreground near the entry point of the painting utilizes the Northern Song painter Zhao Lingrang’s willow-bank style, while the main body of the painting shows a combination of Huang Gongwang and Dong Qichang’s method of layering and piling up rocks, as the distant mountains convey the ambience of the Mi style. Dong Qichang had similarly mixed styles to arrive at a pastiche that had great influence among later painters, including Zhang Yingjun. Zhang’s time at Dong Bangda’s residence in Beijing must have occurred during Dong Bangda’s last years. This was after the passing of the Latter Two Wangs (Wang Yuanqi and Wang Hui). The orthodox school had been transmitted through Dong Bangda. In this regard, Zhang Yingjun could be considered the descendant of the so-called orthodox school. Given the date of the painting (1821), this was probably a late work of the artist. (An-yi Pan, “Nature Observed and Imagined: Five Hundred Years of Chinese Painting,” catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by An-yi Pan and Ellen Avril, and presented at the Johnson Museum April 10–June 13, 2010)