The Peony in Art

by Dr. Iris Burgdorfer-Elles, Zurich

The tree peony has been used and cultivated in Asia for nearly 4000 years. While it was first used as a medicinal plant it was then soon introduced into gardens as a decorative plant and became a popular subject in ancient Chinese art and literature. The picture here shown is from the Ch'ing time (17th century). (Walter Good)

The tree peony in its original form had a single aureola of petals round a golden centre. But already in the imperial gardens of China in the T'ang time, i.e. more than a thousand years ago, lavishly full specimens of tree peonies in various colors were bred. Today there are hundreds of cultivars of tree peonies. The wooden stem may outgrow a man's height, while the flowers are delicately silken to the touch and often have a delicious frangrance.

For the ancient Chinese the tree peony did not only become a highly appreciated sign of spring but also a symbol of love and affection. In it they saw a harmonious combination of manly strength and womanly beauty: the two principles of Yang (stem) and Ying (flower) of the Buddhist philosophy. In this profound sense we must also understand our tree peony painting by Yun Shou-p'ing, which is the property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Little is known about the biography of the Chinese painter Yun Shou-p'ing.

He was born in the province of Kiangsou in northern China. He was educated in the Ling-yin-ssu temple, later on then by relatives, since his father had to flee to southern China because of political persecution and in 1653 became a monk. Yun Shou-p'ing took up the career of an official and, as was usual, was sent to distant provinces so that the danger of nepotism could be excluded. On his long and slow travels he not only became acquainted with nature and landscapes but also with culture and art collections of the huge Chinese empire. Yun Shou-p'ing showed great interest in painting, calligraphy and literature, and eventually became a so-called scholar-painter, of a mastership far abovee the average, that means he was an amateur painter in the highest sense of the word. He pursued his art as a hobby, for the pleasure and recreation of himself and the spectator. He could choose his motivs according to his own liking: so he dedicated himself mainly to light, cheerful, elevating genre painting, leaving the shady themes of life, those of war, fight, disease, misery, death and impermanence, all of which we would sum up under the collective concept of "vanitas" to the professional painters who had to earn their living by work.

As a painter Yun Shou-p'ing first studied the old masters and their techniques. Yet he apparently found it rather hard to get into the spirit of strange styles unreservedly, as the strict Chinese art tradition required. Again and again his own originality broke free, which worried him deeply, whereas originality is so highly esteemed in western culture. He, however, greatly admired the painter Wang-Hui, his minor only by one year, somewhat of an eclectic, an imitator and in our opinion far less talented. With Wang-Hui, a man of the world, who had access to the highest circles of society, Yun Shou-p'ing was bound in a stimulating and prosperous artistic friendship for life. Together they undertook painting trips, exchanged experience and even gave each other permission to paint certain details or inscriptions into one another's paintings.Together with three other Wangs as well as Wu-Li the two friends belong to the six most famous painters of the Ch'ing dynasty, in one word a climax of Chinese painting.

Before his relatively early death in the fifty-seventh year of his life (1690) Yun Shou-p'ing withdrew more and more from the world, in order to search for the essential secrets of life and nature in solitude and quiet.

And indeed Yun Shou-p'ing work shows a very original and deeply felt love of nature. Hardly any stylistic stages of development can be found, at best an ever increasing refinement and individualization in the painting techniques as well as a specialization in the portrayal genre from landscapes to flowers - a tendency that his painter friend Wang-hui did not approve of, as he considered flower still-live as "genre mineur" (that was also the common opinion of western art circles for a long time). Yun Shou-p'ing once commented on that:

But what flowers, what leaves did Yun Shou-p'ing paint! Bamboo, chrysanthemums, lotos, roses, peach and prune blossoms and of course peonies. He was simply bound to find success as "father of still-life flower painting".

A great example is given in the portrayal of a tree peony by Yun Shou-p'ing.

It is painted fully life-size on a scroll of ca. 208 cm x 105 cm. Such pictures were rolled open only on certain occasions when the owner and spectator intended to evoke in himself a certain mood - in our case he probably wished to meditate about a moment of spring-like poetic atmosphere.

Tree peonies, painting of Yun Shou-p'ing

On only sparsely cultivated under-and background the gigantic tree peony with many full-blown double flowers rises up towards the sky, apparently endlessly. Once Yun Shou-p'ing put down the following characterstic entry into his diary:

In the same way the side branches of the peony reach out in all directions towards the open free space. There is no restricting frame either: the eye is to be allowed to roam boundlessly into the infinity of space all along the more and more delicately tapering ramifications. The surrounding space is considered to be almost as important as the plant itself, which receives its capacity of breathing, developing and living from that space. The artist is not afraid that out of a "horror vacui" he might have to fill the scroll, rather he yields to his love of emptiness, to an "amor vaicui". He easily masters the fragile balance with a few calligraphic characters and printed seals. He achieves the effect of depth and space not by perspective drawing or by violent dark-light effects and contrasts (such as in our culture had been the artistic conception for centuries since the Renaissance). According to his own words he follows the "boneless" painting of the master painter Hsu Ch'ung-ssu whose personal acquaintance he had made shortly before Hsu's death. Like Hsu Ch'ung-ssu he doesn't use a brush with black ink to draw contours, but works solely with color: with the finest differentiations and nuances of the basic colours yellow, blue, red and green, colors that he obtained from plants and stones (minerals). To enhance the brilliancy of the colors he occasionally paints the reverse of the extremely thinly woven silk base. It is this gossamer transparency which also allows the underlaying of pencil sketches so that no corrections impair the impression of spontaneously fresh nature and art.

The enormous richly double flower masses with their frilled and frayed petals are set off with exquisite skill from the finely veined curved leaves of various lighter and darker shades of green, which spread evenly and often overlap. Of some we see the backside, of others the front.

Tree peonies of Shou-p'ing (detail)

What may astonish the spectator is the combination of as many as nine flowers on one and the same plant, all in different colors, white, yellowish, pink, red and delicately lilac with protruding pearlwhite stamens made of ground shells. Perhaps they show that art of grafting, which the old Chinese gardeners are said to have so brilliantly mastered? Or does the painter hereby demonstrate his creative will not to adhere slavishly to a scientific reproduction, but to make us feel the enthusiastic artistic vision of the complete beauty of the tree peony? It is not so much the botanical copy of nature that has fascinated and delighted the spectator up to the present day, but the poetic essence of the miracle of nature, which is here so admirabley captured with the brush and a light, adjusting, "abstracting" hand. Yun Shou-p'ing is said not only to have been a highly gifted painter, but also a poet of inspiring imagination. According to his own words, however, he preferred expressing emotions by means of the brush.

Literature:	Evererr Fahy	Metropolitan Flowers, New York 1982
	Victoria Contag	Die sechs berühmten Maler der Ch'ing-Dynastie, Leipzig 1940

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