Ink Plum Blossoms
To-So-Gen-Min meiga taikan [Catalogue of an exhibition of Chinese paintings of the T’ang, Sung, Yuan, and Ming dynasties]. Tokyo Imperial Museum, 1928.
Masterpieces of Chinese Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, November 19, 1954-January 2, 1955.
This ink plum painting, probably dating to the 14th or 15th century, bears an inscription that alludes to the snowy plum paintings of Wang Mian (1287-1359). Wang was a pivotal artist whose work epitomized the stylistic and iconographic model of ink plums, as seen in the ink brushwork and soaring shoots apparent in this painting.
Plum painting established itself as a popular genre because of its symbolism of purity and strength in chilly weather. Plums have been the subject of many printed volumes for painting instruction. Their battered boughs, angular, leafless shoots and understated blossoms provided a lively graphic image for the artists to depict.
With Michelangelo Piacentini (d. 2005), Tokyo, by 1951 [1];
Purchased from Piacentini by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1951.
NOTES:
[1] Piacentini was an Italian art historian based in Tokyo after the Second World War. He studied Italian Renaissance art, while collecting and dealing in Asian objects.
Harada Bizan, Nihon genzai shina meiga mokuroku [Chinese paintings now in Japan] (Tokyo: 1938), 104.
To-So-Gen-Min meiga taikan [Catalogue of an exhibition of Chinese paintings of the T’ang, Sung, Yuan, and Ming dynasties], (Tokyo Imperial Museum: Tokyo, 1930), pl.197.
Kinjiro Harada, Shina meiga Hokan [The pageant of Chinese painting], (Tokyo, 1930), pl. 387.
Williams Cohn, Chinese Painting (London, 1948), pl. 176.
Osvald Siren, Chinese Painting: Leading masters and Principles, 7 vols. (New York, 1956-1958), vol. VI, pl. 24.
Wai-Kam Ho, et al., Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art. (The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, c1980), 108-110, no.89.
