The Three Friends of Winter
The Three Friends of Winter are the pine, plum and bamboo, depicted here from left to right. Because the three flourish during the harsh months of winter, they came to symbolize the ideal Confucian scholar-official, who likewise endures the cold winds of adversity.
Wang Yuanqi embraced the principles of painting promoted by Dong Qichang (see his paintings on this wall) and further developed his analytic style. Like Dong, Wang plays with forms by breaking up the landscape structure into discrete units. Here, he cleverly shrinks the trees and piles of rocks into a bonsai-like scene, creating deliberate confusion as to whether a real or miniature landscape is intended.
The artist’s inscription reads:
“The three gentlemen of winter
Entwine their roots on the cliff.
Atop high mountains they near the sun,
Tall and stately, they differ from common trees.
On the sixteenth day of the twelfth month in the renwu year [1702],
I sketched this concept on the way to Mount Xi [Wuxi, Jiangsu]. Lutai, Qi.”
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.
Hu Ching, Shih-ch’u pao-chi san-pien [Catalogue of painting and calligraphy in the Imperial collection: final sequel 9 Part III)] (Taipei, 1969). Vol. IX, 4140.
Ross E. Taggart, George L. McKenna, and Marc F. Wilson, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. II, Art of the Orient. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973). 72.
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), 337, no. 249.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 331.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008). 372, fig. 274.
