Painted by Wang Jiqian ( better known in the West as C. C. Wang; 1907-2003), this wall scroll represents a mountain landscape. The tall mountain that rises along the painting's central, vertical axis dominates the composition. A deep valley flanks the central mountain on either side; the valleys separate the central peak from the subsidiary mountains that appear at left and right, and they afford views of the mist-obscured mountains and waterfalls that occupy the distant background. The landscape, which was painted in ink on paper, appears solely in tones of black and gray.
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Painted in the early 1970s, when the artist was experimenting with various and varied techniques of applying ink to paper, the painting reveals that the artist crumpled localized areas of the paper before he applied the ink; the crumpling created a network of lines in the paper that absorbed the ink more readily than the surrounding matrix, so that those lines appear very black in the finished painting. They are most visible in the center of the dominant mountain. In utilizing this crumpling technique, the artist relied upon the resulting network of lines, rather than upon traditional brushwork, to texture the craggy mountain surfaces. Once the paper had been properly and appropriately crumpled, the artist used ink washes to create the mountains; the then used even wetter washes of ink to create the very cloudy skies. Of course, the artist used a brush to manipulate the ink washes, just as he also used a brush to add the large dots in the foreground that suggest trees and other foliage.
Wang Jiqian--originally named Wang Jiquan--was born into a distinguished, scholarly family in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, in 1907. He received a classical Chinese education at home, studying with a private tutor. He began to study painting when he was fourteen years old. Although he studied law at Suzhou University (in Shanghai), his real love was Chinese painting, which he studied with several masters, first with Gu Linshi (1865-1933) and then with famed master Wu Hufan (1894-1968) with whom he became close friends. Through Wu, Wang Jiqian gained access to the excellent private collection of Pang Yuanqi (1865-1949). Through study and through first-hand examination of Chinese paintings, Wang became not only a leading painter but a leading connoisseur of classical Chinese paintings. In fact, in 1935 and 1936, he served as an adviser to the Chinese government on the organization of the large exhibition of Chinese art that was featured at Burlington House, London, in 1936.
Wang Jiqian moved to the U.S. in 1949. He served as a Visiting Lecturer on Chinese painting at Columbia University and he studied Western painting techniques at the Art Students League, New York. Wang Jiqian and Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) quickly became the two most famous Chinese ink painters living and working in the U.S. In the end, Wang is remembered as a respected artist, scholar, collector, and connoisseur and is known for his distinctive landscape paintings in which ink was often applied without a brush (like the Lin-bequest painting that we are considering here).
