Attributed to Muqi C. 1210-1270

THIS IS A PREMIUM LOT. CLIENTS WHO WISH TO BID ON PREMIUM LOTS ARE REQUESTED TO COMPLETE THE PREMIUM LOT PRE-REGISTRATION 3 WORKING DAYS PRIOR TO THE SALE.

hanging scroll, ink on silk
signed Muqi, dated Xian Chun jisu, with 2 seals of the artist, one reading Muqi and the other illegible

Acquired from the Tokugawa family, Edo period.
Collection of Earl Yanagisawa.
Sold at Kyoto Bijitsu Club, 23rd June 1924 (Taisho 13), lot 4. 

The Yanagisawa family was a high ranking Daimyo (feudal lord) during the Tokugawa Shogunate from Koriyama, Nara Prefecture. There is a letter mentioning that the painting is ryuei gomotsu, meaning "the works of art for the tea ceremony passed down from the Tokugawa family."

Sôgenga: 12th-14th Century Chinese Paintings as Collected and Appreciated in Japan, James Cahill, Berkeley, University Art Museum, 31st March - 27th June 1982, cat.no.14.
Ink Mists: Zen Paintings By Muqi, Gotoh Museum, Tokyo,1996, cat.no. 7.

Scarlett Ju-Yu Jang, "Ox-Herding Painting in the Sung Dynasty," Artibus Asiae, Vol. 52, No. 1/2, Rietberg Museum, Zurich, 1992, p.82, fig. 14.
Nihon Suiboku Meihin Zufu, Mainichi Newspaper Co Ltd., September 1993, p.16 no. 5 & 6.
Sekai bijutsu tai zenshu /New History of World Art: Toyo hen [Eastern series], vol.6, Tokyo, 2000, pl.130.

Remarkably, the painting is in very good condition. The painting has been remounted, but there appears to be no repainting. There are just some horizontal creases to the silk near the lower left side near the rocks and a single vertical crease down the centre. The remounted ground is visible through the creases. There are about 20 or so small white spots (1-2 cm diameter) concentrated on the upper right side and along the lower right side near the base. The silk appears to have been originally stained by the painter. The painting was remounted in Japan with Japanese mounting.
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Li Yuan and Yuanze, a thirteenth-century painting attributed to Muqi (active 1265-1269)
Richard Barnhart, Professor Emeritus of Art History, Yale University

This rare painting is one of the very few extant works with signature, seal, and inscribed date of the great Song artist Muqi (active ca. 1265-1269; died between 1269 and 1293), whose art has come to embody the ideals of Chan or Zen Buddhism more richly than any other, and whose influence extends beyond China to Japan, where it inspired centuries of creativity and exploration. We date it to the late thirteenth century and believe that it is among the central works representing the artist today.

Its subject refers to the legendary friendship between a Buddhist monk named Yuanze and the scholar Li Yuan in the eighth century. Yuanze was able to re-enter the womb and be born again, which he did twice during his recorded lifetime, thus experiencing the "three lives" that his legend preserves. His intimate friend Li Yuan was able to confirm Yuanze's extraordinary story because he saw him in each of his three lives, during the second of which he appeared to Li Yuan as a young boy on the back of a water buffalo; that is the scene depicted here. Their meeting takes place under the glow of a full moon in the shadows of an ancient pine tree hung with vines. Wind sweeps Li Yuan's robes around him, and moves the trailing vines hanging in the moonlight ¹. 

The signature written in the upper right corner of the painting is almost the same as that inscribed on one of a pair of paintings by Muqi in the Daitokuji temple in Kyoto, written there identically: Xianshun ji si[1269] Muqi over or under a seal reading Muqi (fig.1). The Daitokuji inscription is somewhat larger, but the two are very similar in style, and are either by the same hand or copied one from the other ². 

Under or over the signature on the present painting is a seal that can be read as Muqi, measuring 3.9 cm in height and apparently square although the right border is partly lost in remounting. This seal is very similar to that of the artist on his masterpiece, the White-robed Guanyin, also in the Daitokuji temple (fig.2).  A second seal, in the upper left corner of the present work, is illegible³.

Other Versions of the Subject
There appear to be at least two other versions of this same subject, both painted on silk. The first, compositionally and stylistically very similar to the present work though done as a vertical hanging scroll, is the leftmost scroll of a White-robed Guanyin triptych, owned by the Honpoji temple in Kyoto (fig. 3). It has been illustrated and discussed by Nishigami. The Honpoji hanging scroll is attributed to a painter named Zhang Fangru, unknown in China, but recorded in Japan as a follower of Muqi. The Honpoji scroll is so similar to the present item that it appears either to have been closely based upon it or painted by the same master.

A different version of the subject, closer in style to the Southern Song academy, and done in handscroll format, with important early documentation concerning the subject, is in the British Museum (fig.4); it is attributed to the Southern Song court painter Liu Songnian, and was introduced by Nishigami in his examination of the Honpoji paintings noted above. The richly documented British Museum scroll appears to be roughly contemporary with both the present painting and the Honpoji hanging scroll, a coincidence of date that is in itself striking, indicating the wide popularity and appeal of the strange story of Li Yuan and Yuanze to the Buddhist community of the thirteenth century. Attached to the British Museum handscroll is a biography of the monk Yuanze and numerous comments by members of the Buddhist community added as colophons. They may also be read as commentary on the present work and the Honpoji scroll.

Format and Physical Condition
The painting is done in ink and inkwash on a silk surface that has become somewhat darkened, abraded and damaged with time. The present mounting was done in Japan in conformity with the conventions of the tea ceremony with which the painting has traditionally been associated, like nearly all other works attributed to Muqi, but the painting was probably mounted differently earlier. The measurements, 44.1 x 83.5 cm., are those of a format popular in Japan called hengpi or horizontal hanging scroll. The closest similar work among attributions to Muqi is the "Dragon" in the Nezu Museum, a hengpi on silk measuring 46 x 92 cm⁴.  There is a vertical crease and partial break in the silk near the center of the scroll, probably caused by frequent folding at an early stage. While there are other minor tears and pulls to the silk, the condition of the surface is similar to other examples from the late Song period. A few areas of the silk were repaired long ago, especially an area near the top center below the moon among the foliage and branches of the overhanging tree. The painting may once have been part of a large album, later becoming a hanging scroll in its present form.

Muqi and his Art
Muqi is perhaps the greatest painter of the late Song period, and an artist whose works have long been taken to represent the category of Chan or Zen painting. The vast body of art associated with his name is one of the most diverse in all of East Asian art, having been produced not only by Muqi himself and his immediate disciples and followers in China in the thirteenth century but by many other artists ranging across several centuries in both China and Japan after his death. Muqi's art and style became a necessary and essential element in the tea ceremony of Japan long after he was dead and forgotten in China, and paintings in his typical styles continued to be made for that steady market and for the vast community of Buddhist temples throughout Japan that never ceased to look for images of remoteness, quietness, simplicity and strangeness considered desirable to the mood of temples and monasteries.

In China, meanwhile, Muqi's art was disparaged by an elite group of scholars in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion of China in 1279. The reasons that have been advanced for this radical change in attitudes toward the artist remain frustratingly unsatisfying. Describing his art as "coarse and ugly, lacking the ancient methods," and "certainly not in good taste" (Tuhui baojian, see Gotoh Museum cat., p. 153) hides rather than reveals the causes for such murderous rejection. Unfortunately, scarcely anything is known about Muqi's life, even the approximate dates of his birth and death, which might clarify this sea change in his reputation. It is known only that he was a native of Sichuan, studied with the distinguished Chan master Wujun Shifan (1178-1249) in the city of Hangzhou and was given the priest's name of Fachang, and used the hao of Muqi. He was a poet as well as a noted and versatile painter of Buddhist subjects, landscapes, and bird-and-flower subjects, and died sometime during the long Zhiyuan era [1264-1293]⁵.  This means that it is possible that he lived through the destruction of Southern Song into the period of Mongol occupation, thus embroiling his art and reputation in the dangers and complex issues of changing loyalties and vicious disputes during the disruption caused by the first foreign conquest of China. The statement by Muqi's follower Wu Taisu around 1350 that the artist had insulted the powerful prime-minister of China, Jia Sidao (died 1275), and fled into hiding to avoid arrest may at least be taken to suggest that Muqi was deeply involved in the politics of his dangerous time in ways that are now buried in history, and that lie behind the brutal rejection of his art. But it may also be true that the turn away from illusionistic painting in China after 1300 toward a more refined, idealized art rooted in classical models and canonical calligraphic ideals quickly turned attention away from all late Song artists, not only the Buddhist painters Muqi and Yujian, but court masters such as Ma Lin and Xia Gui.

Nonetheless, over three hundred paintings associated with Muqi are appended to the Gotoh Museum catalog of 1996 (pp. 110-129). Analyzing and understanding this vast oeuvre from an art-historical point of view begins with the famous triptych in the Daitokuji temple collection in Kyoto, Japan, a set of three hanging scrolls on silk composed of a central White-robed Guanyin flanked by gibbons in a pine tree and a crane in a bamboo forest (figure 00). Some believe that the central Guanyin image, painted in inkwash only, may have been originally separate from the two flanking scrolls. These latter may have been painted as a set, and subsequently joined to the Guanyin to form the present triptych. No one can be sure, of course, but whether originally separate or not, the Daitokuji triptych is now the chef d'oeuvre among all Muqi attributions, and the only signature work universally recognized as such. The Guanyin scroll is signed: Shu Seng Fachang jin zhi (Fachang, a priest from Shu, respectfully made this) over or under a square seal reading Muqi. While neither the gibbon nor crane panel has a signature, both have a single seal reading Muqi. The Daitokuji triptych has been in Japan since about 1400, as established by the seals on the paintings and catalogue records of its ownership, and is but one of the many extant works associated with the artist depicting the deities, historical persona and legendary figures of Buddhism and Daoism.

Also bearing the artist's seal, and no less compellingly the work of Muqi, is the mysterious Luohan and Serpent kept in the Seikado Library Museum (fig.5). Its similarity in style and composition to the Guanyun is evident, but here the mood is darker, even threatening, and somehow in keeping with the reality of a China soon to be overwhelmed by the Mongols.

Signed and sealed  by the artist and dated 1269, the same year as the present lot, is a pair of hanging scrolls representing a dragon and a tiger kept in the Daitokuji temple collection (See fig.1 for the signature; both paintings are reproduced in the Gotoh Museum catalog, no. 41).

Also compellingly associated with the name of Muqi is a set of paintings illustrating the theme of "Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang," a suite of paintings that is among the most beautiful and accomplished in art history (see Gotoh Museum catalog, nos. 16-22). The transmutation of the concepts of eternity and infinity into art was first explored by the great landscape masters of tenth-century China, and developed during the three-hundred years of the Song dynasty (960-1279). At the end of this era a few painters such as Muqi developed Song pictorial space and distance into suggestions of pure space, flux, and eternal movement that draw to an end the Song experiment with illusion. Nowhere are these achievements seen more vividly than in "Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang."

Harmonious with these artistic goals are the assorted images of swallows, myna birds, gibbons, fruits, vegetables, and flowers that form yet another category of subject matter closely associated with Muqi (Gotoh Museum catalog, nos. 23-39). Many of them remain among the most affecting and graphically beautiful of all such representations in Chinese art. That Muqi often painted such images is confirmed not only by the many such paintings bearing his seals that exist in Japan but by the two extant copies of handscrolls by him combining many such diverse subjects, one, as we have noted, in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, and the other in the Palace Museum, Beijing (the Beijing scroll is reproduced in the Gotoh Museum cat., p. 128)⁶. 

Li Yuan and Yuanze and the Art of Muqi
Li Yuan and Yuanze is best understood within the huge oeuvre associated with Muqi by examining its technique in the context of what we will heuristically term the "Zen scene" (Chan jing) compositions on silk associated with the master. By this we refer to those relatively few paintings on silk that create a substantial landscape setting within which iconic figures or animals or birds are depicted. This small group, consisting above all of the three Daitokuji scrolls, the Seikado Library Luohan, a large silk hanging scroll of Fenggan, Hanshan and Shide in the Idemitsu Museum, Tokyo (Gotoh Museum cat., no. 10) and the present painting especially cohere quite plausibly as a single, consistent oeuvre⁷ .  They share a distinctive technical procedure and vision that we take to be characteristic of Muqi.

It is possible that an opaque white or yellow pigment was used for the moon in the present painting, but there is little if any trace of this left. Even if opaque white was once added, it is clear that the circle of the moon was created by applying a pale inkwash over the entire surface of the silk except for a circular patch covering the area now given to the moon's image. And this is the beginning of the technique that Muqi used when painting "Zen scenes" on silk. First he washed pale ink over most of the silk, leaving some areas unpainted: the moon in the present painting; the robe of Guanyin and the water below; the body of the crane; and the body of the Seikado Library Luohan. Other areas of sky or water may also have been left unpainted at this stage depending upon the kind of light and shadow anticipated. Then, using pale, watery inkwash, he began layering in his tree and rock shapes over this first pale wash like subtle layers of  glaze, building his forms out in slightly darker overlapping washes from the shadows, and ending by adding darker and larger dots and splashes of ink and liquid accents indicating leaves and branches. His figures and animals are done in a careful, realistic, and descriptive way that also conveys the essential character of the subject. His gibbons, his crane, his water buffalo, and all of his figures have a compelling quality of realism.

Making the comparative observations that slowly link together all of the works of Muqi begins with understanding of this very rich, painterly procedure, which is virtually unique to Muqi. It has the visual effect of blending sky, water, earth, and the occupants of each into a single, unifying light-filled atmosphere and evocative mood. The landscape paintings of his Xiao and Xiang set use the same techniques on paper, and must also belong within the same oeuvre. At no other time than the late Song period did Chinese artists such as Muqi attend so closely to the integration of the sky with earth and water, and to the mood and atmosphere of light and darkness lent by the sky, as in the bright moon and dark shadows of Li Yuan and Yuanze.
 
1. For the identification, see Nishigami in Zen no Bijutsu, pp. 235-240, and Jang in Artibus Asiae, LII, pp. 54-93. See also Ink Mists: Zen Paintings by Muqi, Gotoh Museum, Gotoh Museum cat. no. 7.
2. The only other Muqi with an inscribed date - though it is recognized as a copy, along with the painting on which it is written - is the long handscroll of flowers, fruits, miscellaneous plants and birds in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. There the signature reads Xianshun gaiyuan [1265] Muqi over or under a square seal reading Muqi. See Gotoh Museum catalog, p. 97, for a reproduction. 
3. The Gotoh Museum identified the second seal on the present painting, which appears to be illegible as possibly reading 'Muqi' (the qi/xi character written with the valley radical). It appears that Muqi used two characters for the qi (pronounced xi) character of his name interchangeably.  One of the characters, as seen in his signature as a water radical.  The other has a valley radical (as seen in possibly the second seal of this painting).  According to the Kangxi Zidian, ('Kangxi Dictionary'), the xi character with the water radical is derived from an earlier character with the valley radical and has the same meaning and sound.  It is possible that Muqi used the character with the water radical for his signatures and the valley radical on some of his seals.  Therefore both characters are acceptable forms of his name.
4. Gotoh Museum cat.no. 40.
5. Virtually all extant documents concerning Muqi are included in the Gotoh Museum catalogue, as well as valuable articles on his life and art. 
6. For further reflections on the entire range of works attributed to Muqi, see James Cahill, An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 166-172.
7. One other Zen painting that is physically and stylistically related to this group is the silk hanging scroll formerly in the Ching Yuan Chai collection and now in the Kyoto National Museum sometimes attributed to Li Yaofu (with whose only signed work it bears little evident relationship) titled Peixiu Paying his Respects to the Priest Huangye Xiyun. See Sogenga, no. 13.