A Bushel of Pearls: Painting for Sale in Eighteenth-Century Yangchow.

• Author: Harrist, Jr., Robert E.
• Position: Book Review

By GINGER CHENG-CHI HSU. Stanford: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. 314, illus. $49.50.

The title of Ginger Cheng-chi Hsu's excellent book will conjure up for many readers memories of "The Eight Eccentrics of Yangchow." Coined in the nineteenth century, this label was one of the most useless in the number-happy history of Chinese critical writing on art. The roster of eight was never fixed, and any grouping that could have encompassed artists as diverse as those proposed for inclusion by various writers was of dubious historical value. Hsu dispenses with this old rubric and focuses on four painters--Fang Shih-shu, Huang Shen, Chang Hsieh, and Chin Nung--who lived and worked, in some cases only briefly, in Yangchow and whose careers reflect what she terms the "commodification of literati culture" during the height of the city's prosperity in the eighteenth century. These four artists painted in radically different styles and appealed to a wide range of viewers, not just cultivated bibliophiles like the wealthy Ma brothers whom Hsu introduces in her first chapter. What united these artists, and attracted their patrons, was their skillful marketing, through subtle and unsubtle means, of paintings that seemed both traditional and novel, rooted in the past but adapted to restlessly changing urban tastes.

Fang Shih-shu, from a family of Anhui salt merchants earned a civil service degree and held a post as a government official before turning to painting as a career. Taking up life in Yangchow as a "professional amateur," admired for his poetry and his painting, he lived comfortably off the hospitality of wealthy patrons such as the Ma brothers. His style was based on study of a canonical roster of literati masters certified in the late Ming period by the imperious artist-critic Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and followed by painters of the "Orthodox School" during the early Ch'ing dynasty. This manner of painting was based on conventions of brushwork and composition instantly recognizable as products of high culture among Yangchow patrons whatever their own social class may have been. Huang Shen, from an obscure family in Fukien, began his career as a professional painter by specializing in portraits done in a careful, linear style. It was after seeing cursive script calligraphy by the T'ang master Huai-su that he achieved a breakthrough, developing a vigorous, improvisatory style of figure painting. Although Huang Shen struggled to acquire a literary...