The Adoption and Development of the Gu’s Embroidery in Late-Joseon embroidery

This article uses the idioms of embroidery appreciation as depicted in narrative figure paintings in the collection of the National Museum of Korea, to examine the effects of Gu-style embroidery, which reached Korea during the late Joseon period, on the development of late Joseon embroidered pictures enjoyed by the royal court. The late Joseon period saw unprecedented developments in social, economic and cultural norms. Among these were friendly relations with Qing, allowing Koreans access to new imported culture including various regional Chinese embroidery styles. Gu embroidery became an early source of influence on change and production of embroidery in the royal court. By the 18th century, embroidered everyday items had spread into the private homes of aristocrats and commoners as part of a luxury trend. Expert producers created masterpieces specifically for viewing, which were collected for this purpose. Decorative embroidered screens were created featuring Taoist hermit and narrative figure paintings, driving artistic growth based on motifs of elegance and appreciation of luxury. Characteristics relating to Gu found in these works include: first, the filling of parts corresponding to Gu-style mixed embroidery and painting with long and short stitches and irregular long and short stitches; second, the development of a type of decorative stitching capable of the same elaborate expression as Gu; third, the replacement of untwisted thread, in which Gu style was used to achieve gradation, with twisted thread; fourth, the tracing of the outlines of all pictorial elements with outline stitch, unlike in Gu, emphasizing neatness; fifth, the use of contrasting complementary colors rather than intermediate colors; and sixth, the production of Taoist hermit paintings such as Banquet at Jade Pond and narrative figure paintings as screens. In sum, it can be said that this series of phenomena developed into a formal idiom in Joseon embroidery, which had become more highly renowned than that of China by the 19th century.

美人移動，江南到江戶：狩野探幽對中國仕女圖的傳移模寫

<p>明代中國繪畫傳至日本，成為江戶時代重要的創作素材。江戶早期狩野派畫家狩野探幽經多年蒐集和摹寫，繪製了大量以中國古畫為主的縮小摹本，稱作「探幽縮圖」。用於繪畫素材、鑑定筆記及門派傳承等，影響深遠。中國女性是其中重要題材。基於皆川三知關於「縮圖」中多於107幅「唐美人」圖的統計，本文從中日跨文化角度探討「縮圖」中國仕女圖的摹寫方法、來源和運用，並試論日本江戶時代對中國女性題材繪畫及其作偽的受容。發現「縮圖」多擅仕女畫的明代蘇州「吳門」畫家唐寅、仇英款，也有不長於仕女題材的江南名家如元代趙孟頫、趙雍，指出「蘇州片」為其重要來源。再以耕織圖、西王母圖為案例，探討了跨文化背景下中國女性圖像雜糅及重新詮釋問題。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>&quot;During the Ming dynasty, Chinese paintings were transmitted to Japan and became an essential visual source for Japanese paintings of the Edo period (1615-1867). Kanō Tan&rsquo;yū (1602-1674), a leading artist of the early Edo Kanō School, spent his lifetime copying numerous earlier Chinese paintings, as well as some Japanese and Korean works. He left thousands of small-sized sketches, called Tan&rsquo;yū Shukuzu [Tan&rsquo;yū&rsquo;s Small Sketches], leaving a lasting impact on the Japanese painting realm. They were made for multiple purposes, as painting models, authentication notes, teaching materials, and a symbol of a painter&rsquo;s status. Sanko Minagawa&rsquo;s research survey indicates the existence of more than 107 sketches of Chinese female images, as one of the major subjects, in Tan&rsquo;yū Shukuzu. </p> <p> This paper focuses on Tan&rsquo;yū&rsquo;s copies of Chinese female-figure paintings (often called tobijinzu, &ldquo;pictures of Chinese beauties,&rdquo; in Japanese) that were largely overlapped with while beyond the scope of the shin&uuml; tu or meiren hua genre (paintings of beautiful ladies) in Chinese art. It discusses the reproduction mechanism of Shukuzu in comparison with the Chinese fenben practice. It also examines the attributed Chinese artists&rsquo; signatures copied by Tan&rsquo;yū in Shukuzu, e.g., Qiu Ying and Tang Yin (famed for beautiful women paintings), Zhao Mengfu and Zhao Yong (no extant authentic female-figure paintings), and it identifies the late Ming Suzhou Pian workshop as an important original Chinese source. It provides a fresh angle to approach the perception of Chinese &ldquo;forgery&rdquo; paintings and the long-term use of Shukuzu in re-making and reinterpreting Chinese paintings in Edo Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Through two case studies from a transcultural perspective, it shows the combination of two Chinese pictorial systems, gengzhi tu (Pictures of Tilling and Weaving) and shin&uuml; tu, in a Kanō School scroll; and the transformation of the Queen Mother of the West, from a powerful female Daoist immortal signified by peaches of immortality to a secularized beautiful lady holding peach blossoms, in Kanō School paintings. </p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Bakusen, Tsuchida (1887–1936)

Tsuchida Bakusen was a Nihonga (traditional-style) painter from the Kyoto Painting Circle. He was also the leading founder of the Association for the Creation of National Painting [国画創作協会] [Kokuga Sôsaku Kyôkai] (1918–1928). Bakusen moved to Kyoto in 1903 to study at Suzuki Shônen’s [鈴木松年] (1848–1918) art school. He later joined Takeuchi Seihô’s [竹内栖鳳] (1864–1942) school, thriving under his tutelage in a nurturing environment. In the years following his graduation from Kyoto Municipal Painting College, where he studied from 1909–1911, Bakusen produced Nihonga works such as Island Women (1912), which were influenced by the French post-impressionists like Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne. Bakusen exhibited at government-sponsored Bunten and Teiten exhibitions, but his dissatisfaction with the former led to a hiatus during which he established the Association and exhibited only at its exhibitions, the Kokuten. Bakusen’s work comprises figure paintings, mostly of women or children in rural landscapes. Bathhouse Maiden (1918), declared an important cultural property, and Maiko in a Garden (1924) represent some of his masterpieces.

Seurat, Georges-Pierre (1859–1891)

Born in Paris in 1859 to a bourgeois family, painter and draughtsman Georges-Pierre Seurat enjoyed a brief but mature career as the leading French Neo-Impressionist. His invention of Divisionism (or "chromo-luminarism"), a painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics, challenged the spontaneity and fluidity of Impressionism, which by the 1880s had been largely subsumed by a capitalist gallery system. In 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, Seurat debuted his monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte (1884–1886), a "patient tapestry" of line and color that led the art critic and activist Félix Fénéon to coin the term néo-impressionisme. Equally shaped by the Renaissance frescoes of Piero della Francesca and the Baudelairean praise of the ephemerality of modern life, La Grande-Jatte symbolically closed a chapter in French painting. Seurat’s systematic aesthetic produced an indelible impact on fin de siècle artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, and later Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and André Breton’s Surrealism, firmly establishing him as integral to the 20th-century avant-garde. Seurat’s oeuvre includes approximately 500 drawings and 6 major figure paintings, an astonishing output for a career that lasted only 11 years.