Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. The earliest paintings were not representational but ornamental; they consisted of patterns or designs rather than pictures. Stone Age pottery was painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals. It was only during the Warring States Period (403-221 B.C.) that artists began to represent the world around them.

Painting in the traditional style is known today in Chinese as guó huà, meaning national or native painting. Guó huàl painting involves essentially the same techniques as calligraphy and is done with a brush dipped in black or colored ink; oils are not used. As with calligraphy, the most popular materials on which paintings are made of are paper and silk. The finished work is then mounted on scrolls, which can be hung or rolled up. Traditional painting also is done in albums and on walls, lacquerwork, and other media.

Building on the tradition of calligraphy, Chinese painting developed a distinctive style that differs greatly from Western painting. It is more efficient in terms of brushstrokes and appears more abstract. Landscapes have always been a popular theme, and sometimes these appear bizarre to the Western eye. To the Chinese painter, they may represent a figurative view painted with a few swift strokes of the artist's brush.

The Traditional Chinese Artistic Approach

Personal Expression Valued Over Realism - Although realistic painting in the European style was very much in vogue at the Qing court, where it was appreciated for its documentary value in commemorating the Qianlong Emperor's exploits, it was not regarded as high art. The Chinese and their Manchu rulers held to the belief that the highest form of pictorial expression was traditional Chinese painting, which privileged the personal expression of the individual artist over the representation of external appearances. Since the 14th century what mattered most in Chinese painting was the artist's ability to express his personal feelings, to create an image of his interior world, rather than to describe the external appearances of things. As a result, most Chinese painting connoisseurs regarded the European style as little more than a gimmick.

The Importance of Poetry for Artists and Connoisseurs - Chinese literati artists often wrote poems directly on their paintings. This practice emphasized the importance of both poetry and calligraphy to the art of painting and also highlighted the notion that a painting should not try to represent or imitate the external world, but rather to express or reflect the inner state of the artist. The artist's practice of writing poetry directly on the painting also led to the custom of later appreciators of the work, perhaps the initial recipient of the painting or a later owner, adding their own reactions to the work, often also in the form of poetry. These inscriptions could be added either directly on the surface of the painting, or sometimes on a sheet of paper mounted adjacent to the painting. In this way some handscrolls accommodated numerous colophons by later owners and admirers. Thus in Chinese art the act of ownership entailed the responsibility of not only caring for the work properly, but to a certain extent also recording one's response to it.

The Work of Art as a Dialogue with the Past: The Role of Owners and Connoisseurs - One of the most extraordinary characteristics of Chinese painting is that, in a way, a painting is never quite finished. What does this mean? Just as the artists themselves used poetry as a medium of expression in painting, later appreciators of a painting felt free to add to it by writing a poem in response to the work, or sometimes just adding a personal seal, directly on the surface of the painting or to the silk mounting bordering the painting. In this way a painting remains "open-ended," and viewing a painting is like engaging in an ongoing conversation, not only with the artist, but with all the people who have in the past owned the work and have recorded their response to it. And through this visual record, a painting's provenance can be traced, so that literally written on the surface of the painting is the very history of who owned it, how people over time have appreciated it, and how different eras saw its merits in a different light. When a connoisseur looks at a painting today, he or she not only examines the work, but takes great delight in seeing which other collectors owned it, and what some of these owners and other commentators have had to say about it.

Chinese Approaches to Representing Space

Chinese artists' approach to the problem of representing spatial depth on a flat surface is quite different from that of their Western counterparts. In the West, in Greco-Roman times and again in the Renaissance, artists created the illusion of spatial depth on a flat surface through the use of linear perspective, which meant that implied parallel lines were drawn to intersect at an imaginary point on the horizon called the vanishing point, and all forms were rendered in scale and positioned to correspond to these guiding lines. As a result, there is a kind of geometric logic to the composition in Western painting, and the viewing frame which can be seen all at once, unlike in a Chinese handscroll painting was experienced as a kind of window onto another world.

Pictorial space in Chinese painting is defined somewhat differently from the foreground, middle ground, and background typically found in traditional Western painting. In Scroll Three of the Kangxi Inspection Tour series, three distinct classifications of pictorial space, as defined by the 11th-century artist Guo Xi, can be seen in the artist's treatment of the mountains: "From the bottom of the mountain looking up toward the top, this is called 'high distance' (gaoyuan). From the front of the mountain peering into the back of the mountain, this is called 'deep distance' (shenyuan). From a nearby mountain looking past distant mountains, this is called 'level distance' (pingyuan)."

In fact, the very formats that are used in Chinese painting, particularly the long handscroll, have an impact on how pictorial space itself is conceptualized in the Chinese painting tradition. Imagine unrolling a scroll painting, for instance, from right to left as one would in viewing a Chinese painting. The scroll may be as long 60, 70, or even 80 feet, so it is impossible to see much more than a small section of the entire painting at once. And in fact, the work was not meant to be seen all at once. Unlike a traditional Western painting, which is contained within a distinct frame, a painting on a long scroll that has to be unrolled section by section would not make sense visually if it were composed with a technique such as linear perspective, which depends on the use of a single, fixed vanishing point. In a long scroll, the viewer controls the boundaries of the viewing frame at any single moment, and the pictorial space unfolds as the viewer unrolls the scroll. In this way, the handscroll format requires that the pictorial space remain fluid. As in traditional Western compositions, there is a foreground, a middle ground, and a far distance, but the artist continuously shifts the focus of the composition so that the viewer's apparent vantage point is constantly changing, enabling him or her to easily navigate the pictorial space unhindered by the constraints of a fixed vanishing point.

For example, the painters of the Qing dynasty were inheritors of a tradition that was already more than a thousand years old. By the 13th century, Chinese artists had mastered the illusion of recession in space. But after this time, the representation of space and the description of the external world gradually ceased to be the principal objective of artists. Working on a flat surface -- such as a canvas or a scroll, an artist faces the challenge of creating the illusion of three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional surface. This is a problem for which artists both in the East and the West found solutions, but their solutions were very different. European painting after the 15th century tended to treat a painting as though the canvas were a window through which an illusionistic three-dimensional scene could be viewed; Chinese painting created the experience of space by means of a moving perspective that allowed the viewer's eye to explore the pictorial space from a shifting vantage point, so that, in the case of a long handscroll such as those chronicling an emperor's journey, space is experienced through the continuous unrolling of the work.

Classification of Chinese Traditional Painting

Traditional Chinese painting has its special materials and tools, consisting of brushes, ink and pigments, xuan paper, silk and various kinds of ink slabs. There are two main techniques in Chinese painting, the Meticulous or Gong-bi technique often referred to as court-style painting and the Freehand or Shui-mo technique which is loosely termed watercolour or brush painting. The Chinese character mo means ink and shui means water. This style is also referred to as xie yi or freehand style.

Based on different classification standards, Chinese traditional painting can be divided into several groups:

Techniques - According to painting techniques, Chinese painting can be divided into two styles: xieyi style and gongbi style. Xieyi, or freehand, is marked by exaggerated forms and freehand brushwork. Gongbi, or meticulous, is characterized by close attention to detail and fine brushwork. Freehand painting generalizes shapes and displays rich brushwork and ink techniques.

Forms - The principal forms of traditional Chinese painting are the hanging scroll, album of paintings, fan surface and long horizontal scroll. Hanging scrolls are both horizontal and vertical, usually mounted and hung on the wall. In an album of paintings the artist paints on a certain size of xuan paper and then binds a number of paintings into an album, which is convenient for storage. Folding fans and round fans made of bamboo strips with painted paper or silk pasted on the frame. The long, horizontal scroll is also called a hand scroll and is usually less than 50 centimeters high but maybe up to 100 meters long.

Subjects - Traditional Chinese painting can be classified as figure paintings, landscapes and flower-and-bird paintings. Landscapes represent a major category in traditional Chinese painting, mainly depicting the natural scenery of mountains and rivers. The range of subject matter in figure painting was extended far beyond religious themes during the Song Dynasty (960-1127). Landscape painting had already established itself as an independent form of expression by the fourth century and gradually branched out into the two separate styles: blue-and-green landscapes using bright blue, green and red pigments; and ink-and-wash landscapes relied on vivid brushwork and inks. Flower-and-bird painting deviated from decorative art to form its own independent genre around the ninth century. Traditional Chinese painting, poetry, Chinese calligraphy, painting and seal engraving are necessary components that supplement and enrich one another. "Painting in poetry and poetry in painting" has been a criterion for excellent works. Inscriptions and seal impressions help explain the painter's ideas and sentiments and also add beauty to the painting.

History of Chinese Painting and Brush Art

Traditional Chinese painting dates back to the Neolithic Age about 6,000 years ago when people began to use minerals to draw simple pictures resembling animals, plants, and even human beings on rocks and produce drawings of amazing designs and decorations on the surface of potteries and later bronze containers. The excavated colored pottery with painted human faces, fish, deer and frogs indicates that the Chinese began painting as far back as the Neolithic Age. The earliest drawings that have been preserved till today were produced on paper and silk, which were burial articles with a history of over 2,000 years.

In its earliest stage, Chinese prehistoric paintings were closely related to other primitive crafts, such as pottery, bronze ware, carved jade and lacquer. The line patterns on unearthed pottery and bronze ware resemble ripples, fishing nets, teeth or frogs. The animal and human figures, succinct and vivid, are proofs to the innate sensitivity of the ancient artists and nature.

Chinese painting or engravings found on precipitous cliffs in Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou in Southwest China; Fujian in East China and Mount Yinshan in Inner Mongolia; Altai in China's extreme west and Heihe in the far north date back to prehistory. Strong visual effects characterize the bright red cliff paintings in southern China that depict scenes of sacrificial rites, production activities and daily life. In comparison, hunting, animal grazing, wars and dancing are the main themes of cliff paintings in northern China. Before paper was invented, the art of silk painting had been developing. The earliest silk painting was excavated from the Mawangdui Tomb in central China of the Warring States Period (476-221 BC). Silk painting reached its artistic peak in the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD25). Following the introduction of Buddhism to China during the first century from India, and the carvings on grottoes and temple building that ensued, the art of painting religious murals gradually gained prominence.

Early Imperial China (221 BC-AD 220)

In imperial times, beginning with the Eastern Jin Dynasty, painting and calligraphy in China were the most highly appreciated arts in court circles and were produced almost exclusively by amateurs aristocrats and scholar officials who had the leisure time necessary to perfect the technique and sensibility necessary for great brushwork. Calligraphy was thought to be the highest and purest form of painting. The implements were the brush pen, made of animal hair, and black inks made from pine soot and animal glue. In ancient times, writing, as well as painting, was done on silk. However, after the invention of paper in the 1st century CE, silk was gradually replaced by the new and cheaper material. Original writings by famous calligraphers have been greatly valued throughout China's history and are mounted on scrolls and hung on walls in the same way that paintings are.

Period of Division (220-581)

China plunged into a situation of divided states from the third to the sixth century where incessant wars and successions of dynasties sharpened the thinking of Chinese artists which, in turn, promoted the development of art. Grotto murals, wall murals in tomb chambers, stone carvings, brick carvings and lacquer paintings flourished in a period deemed very important to the development of traditional Chinese painting The Tang Dynasty (618-907) witnessed the prosperity of figure painting, where the most outstanding painters were Zhang Xuan and Zhou Fang. Their paintings, depicting the life of noble women and court ladies, exerted an eternal influence on the development of shi nu hua (painting of beauties), which comprise an important branch of traditional Chinese painting today.

Beginning in the Five Dynasties (907-960), each dynasty set up an art academy that gathered together the best painters throughout China. Academy members, who were on the government payroll and wore official uniforms, drew portraits of emperors, nobles and aristocrats that depicted their daily lives. The system proved conducive to the development of painting. The succeeding Song Dynasty (960-1127) developed such academies into the Imperial Art Academy.

Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368)

During the Yuan Dynasty the "Four Great Painters" -- Huang Gongwang, Ni Zan, Wei Zhen and Wang Meng -- represented the highest level of landscape painting. Their works immensely influenced landscape painting of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).The Ming Dynasty saw the rise of the Wumen Painting School, which emerged in Suzhou on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Keen to carry on the traditions of Chinese painting, the four Wumen masters blazed new trails and developed their own unique styles. When the Manchus came to power in 1644, the then-best painters showed their resentment to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) court in many ways. The "Four Monk Masters" -- Zhu Da, Shi Tao, Kun Can and Hong Ren -- had their heads shaved to demonstrate their determination not to serve the new dynasty, and they soothed their sadness by painting tranquil nature scenes and traditional art. Yangzhou, which faces Suzhou across the Yangtze River, was home to the "Eight Eccentrics" - the eight painters all with strong characters, proud and aloof, who refused to follow orthodoxy. They used freehand brushwork and broadened the horizon of flower-and-bird painting. By the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, Shanghai, which gave birth to the Shanghai Painting School, had become the most prosperous commercial city and a gathering place for numerous painters. Following the spirit of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, the Shanghai School played a vital role in the transition of Chinese traditional painting from a classical art form to a modern one. The May 4th Movement of 1919, or the New Culture Movement, inspired the Chinese to learn from western art and introduce it to China. Many outstanding painters, led by Xu Beihong, emerged, whose paintings recognized a perfect merging of the merits of both Chinese Art and Western Art styles, absorbing western classicism, romanticism and impressionism. Other great painters of this period include Qi Baishi, Huang Binhong and Zhang Daqian. Oil painting, a western art, was introduced to China in the 17th century and gained popularity in the early 20th century. In the 1980s Chinese oil painting boomed.

Then came popular folk painting -- Chinese New Year pictures pinned up on doors, room walls and windows on the Chinese New Year to invite heavenly blessings and ward off disasters and evil spirits - which dates back to the Qing Dynasty and Han Dynasty. Thanks to the invention of block printing, folk painting became popular in the Song Dynasty and reached its zenith of sophistication in the Qing Dynasty. Woodcuts have become increasingly diverse in style, variety, theme and artistic form since the early 1980s. Artists from the Han (202 BC) to the Tang (618-906) dynasties mainly painted the human figure. Much of what we know of early Chinese figure painting comes from burial sites, where paintings were preserved on silk banners, lacquered objects, and tomb walls. Many early tomb paintings were meant to protect the dead or help their souls get to paradise. Others illustrated the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius or showed scenes of daily life.

Many critics consider landscape to be the highest form of Chinese painting. The time from the Five Dynasties period to the Northern Song period (907-1127) is known as the Great age of Chinese landscape. In the north, artists such as Jing Hao, Fan Kuan, and Guo Xi painted pictures of towering mountains, using strong black lines, ink wash, and sharp, dotted brushstrokes to suggest rough stone. In the south, Dong Yuan, Juran, and other artists painted the rolling hills and rivers of their native countryside in peaceful scenes done with softer, rubbed brushwork. These two kinds of scenes and techniques became the classical styles of Chinese landscape painting.

During the Six Dynasties period (220-589), people began to appreciate painting for its own beauty and to write about art. From this time we begin to know about individual artists, such as Gu Kaizhi. Even when these artists illustrated Confucian moral themes, such as the proper behavior of a wife to her husband or of children to their parents, they tried to make the figures graceful.

Six Principles of Chinese Painting

The Six Principles of Chinese Painting were established by Xie He, a writer, art historian and critic in 5th century China. He is most famous for his six points to consider when judging a painting taken from the preface to his book "The Record of the Classification of Old Painters" written circa 550 A.D. and refers to old and ancient practices. The six elements that define a painting are:

Sui and Tang dynasties (581-960)

During the Tang Dynasty, figure painting flourished at the royal court. Artists such as Zhou Fang showed the splendor of court life in painting of emperors, palace ladies, and imperial horses. Figure painting reached the height of elegant realism in the art of the court of Southern Tang (937-975). Most of the Tang artists outlined figures with fine black lines and used brilliant color and elaborate detail. However, one Tang artist, the master Wu Daozi, used only black ink and freely painted brushstrokes to create ink paintings that were so exciting that crowds gathered to watch him work. From his time on, ink paintings were no longer thought to be preliminary sketches or outlines to be filled in with color. Instead they were valued as finished works of art. Beginning in the Tang Dynasty, many paintings were landscapes, often shanshui or mountain water paintings. In these landscapes, monochromatic and sparse, a style that is collectively called shuimohua, the purpose was not to reproduce exactly the appearance of nature or realism but rather to grasp an emotion or atmosphere so as to catch the rhythm of nature.

Song and Yuan dynasties (960-1368)

Guo Xi, a representative painter of landscape painting in the Northern Song dynasty, has been well known for depicting mountains, rivers and forests in winter. This piece shows a scene of deep and serene mountain valley covered with snow and several old trees struggling to survive on precipitous cliffs. It is a masterpiece of Guo Xi by using light ink and magnificent composition to express his open and high artistic conception.

In the Song Dynasty period (960-1279), landscapes of more subtle expression appeared; immeasurable distances were conveyed through the use of blurred outlines, mountain contours disappearing into the mist, and impressionistic treatment of natural phenomena. Emphasis was placed on the spiritual qualities of the painting and on the ability of the artist to reveal the inner harmony of man and nature, as perceived according to Taoist and Buddhist concepts. One of the most famous artists of the period was Zhang Zeduan, painter of Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Yi Yuanji achieved a high degree of realism painting animals, in particular monkeys and gibbons.

During the Southern Song period (1127-1279), court painters such as Ma Yuan and Xia Gui used strong black brushstrokes to sketch trees and rocks and pale washes to suggest misty space.
While many Chinese artists were attempting to represent three-dimensional objects and to master the illusion of space, another group of painters pursued very different goals. At the end of Northern Song period, the poet Su Shi and the scholar-officials in his circle became serious amateur painters. They created a new kind of art in which they used their skills in calligraphy (the art of beautiful writing) to make ink paintings. From their time onward, many painters strove to freely express their feelings and to capture the inner spirit of their subject instead of describing its outward appearance.

The "Four Generals of Zhongxing" painted by Liu Songnian during the Southern Song Dynasty. Yue Fei is the second person from the left. It is believed to be the "truest portrait of Yue in all extant materials." During the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), painters joined the arts of painting, poetry, and calligraphy by inscribing poems on their paintings. These three arts worked together to express the artist's feelings more completely than one art could do alone. Even so, Mongol Khagan Tugh Temur (r.1328,1329-1332) was very fond of this culture.

Late Imperial China (1368-1895)

Beginning in the 13th century, the tradition of painting simple subjects, a branch with fruit, a few flowers, or one or two horses-developed. Narrative painting, with a wider color range and a much busier composition than Song paintings, was immensely popular during the Ming period (1368-1644).
The first books illustrated with colored woodcuts appeared around this time; as colo-printing techniques were perfected, illustrated manuals on the art of painting began to be published. Jieziyuan Huazhuan (Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden), a five-volume work first published in 1679, has been in use as a technical textbook for artists and students ever since. Some painters of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) continued the traditions of the Yuan scholar-painters. This group of painters, known as the Wu School, was led by the artist Shen Zhou. Another group of painters, known as the Zhe School, revived and transformed the styles of the Song court.

During the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), painters known as Individualists rebelled against many of the traditional rules of painting and found ways to express themselves more directly through free brushwork. In the 1700s and 1800s, great commercial cities such as Yangzhou and Shanghai became art centers where wealthy merchant-patrons encouraged artists to produce bold new works.
In the late 1800s and 1900s, Chinese painters were increasingly exposed to the Western art. Some artists who studied in Europe rejected Chinese painting; others tried to combine the best of both traditions. Perhaps the most beloved modern painter was Qi Baishi, who began life as a poor peasant and became a great master. His best known works depict flowers and small animals.

Schools of Art During the Qing Dynasty

The Individualists - Art during the Qing dynasty was dominated by three major groups of artists. The first, sometimes called the Individualists, was a group of men largely made up of loyalists to the fallen Ming dynasty. The Individualists referred to themselves as leftover subjects of the Ming and practiced a very personal form of art that sought to express their reaction to the Manchu conquest, either a sense of resistance, reclusion, or sadness over the fall of the Ming dynasty. They often removed themselves not only from government circles but also from society, often by becoming Buddhist monks. The Individualists sought to express in their art their own feelings regarding the fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by a group of people whom they regarded as barbarians. These artists focused particularly on the expressive potential of painting and sought not to emulate past models so much as to use poetry, painting, and calligraphy in ways that would express their feelings of defiance and loss over the fall of the Ming dynasty.

The Orthodox School - A second group of Qing artists included those men who dedicated themselves to the preservation of Chinese traditional culture by returning to the careful study of a canon of earlier masters that had been defined in the 17th century. Their commitment to replicating and being inspired by this earlier canon of masterpieces led to the labeling of these artists as the Orthodox school. The Orthodox masters made a point of first imitating these established earlier models and then trying to incorporate these stylistic traditions into their own work. They often created albums of paintings wherein each leaf would be devoted to the exposition of a specific earlier style. In this way, a particular album would demonstrate an individual's command over a whole range of earlier stylistic traditions.

The Court Artists - A third group of Qing artists included commercial and court artists who specialized in large-scale decorative works. Such artists were employed by the imperial court to produce documentary, commemorative, and decorative works for the imperial palaces. Masters of technique, these artists drew upon the representational styles of the Song dynasty, when meticulously descriptive painting techniques were highly revered.

The Literati - In China, the literate elite were often referred to as the "literati." The literati were the gentry class, composed of individuals who passed the civil service exams (or those for whom this was the major goal in life) and who were both the scholarly and governmental elite of the society. The literati also prided themselves on their mastery of calligraphy. Often, as an adjunct to calligraphy, they were also able to paint. During the Qing dynasty, both the Individualists and the Orthodox school masters came from this elite scholar class.

The Individualist and Orthodox masters were proficient scholars who often embellished their paintings with poetry. These men were part of a long-standing tradition of the "scholar-artist" that had existed in China as far back as the 11th century. Members of the educated elite, also called the "literati," had already taken possession of calligraphy, the art of writing, as a form of self-expression. But by the 11th century, they began to apply the aesthetic principles of calligraphic brushwork to painting. They began by painting subjects that could be depicted easily with the brush techniques that they had mastered in the art of calligraphy, such as bamboo, rocks, and pine trees. This approach to subject matter set scholar-artists apart from commercial artists, who pursued a more representational manner.

It was a stroke of genius on the part of the Kangxi Emperor to enlist the foremost Orthodox school master, Wang Hui (1632-1717), to direct the painting of the monumental Southern Inspection Tour scrolls, the execution of which was sure to be an enormous challenge. Wang Hui was one of the leading artists of the time and an acknowledged master at creating long landscape compositions in the handscroll format. Furthermore, his selection immediately identified the Qing court with China's most revered artistic traditions.

The Qianlong Emperor was an avid collector and connoisseur of Chinese art, and the number of paintings and artifacts collected during his reign was unprecedented. Many palace halls were used specifically for the Emperor to admire and study works of art. The Qianlong Emperor had a tendency to admire the works he collected and commissioned by adding a great number of seals and inscriptions -- usually in the form of poems -- to the works. In so doing, the emperor not only endowed these works of art with the imperial imprimatur but also, by leaving his mark on some of the most important works of Chinese art, asserted his control over Chinese culture and his legitimacy as the ultimate connoisseur of Chinese art. Often he must have had ghost writers helping him inscribe these poems, but he did write many of them himself. In fact, the Qianlong Emperor is said to have composed some 40,000 poems, and many of them are inscribed on the enormous collection of paintings amassed during his reign. As a result, the Qianlong Emperor's inscriptions and seals appear on hundreds of the most important Chinese paintings that exist today.

Influence of European Artist on Chinese Painting Styles

Beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, European Jesuit missionaries began to enter China and serve at the imperial court. Many of these missionaries brought engravings, illustrated books, and paintings with them and it was through these visual materials that Chinese were first introduced to Western linear perspective and the use of shading to model forms as if they were illuminated by a single light source called "chiaroscuro," an Italian word literally meaning light-dark. The Chinese were impressed with the Europeans' techniques for creating the illusion of recession on a flat pictorial surface. This was particularly true in court circles, where emperors quickly realized the extent to which this new style of painting could serve well to commemorate and document their activities in a way that would be all the more powerful and convincing because of its realism. It is important to note, however, that even as "realistic" painting in the European style was very much in vogue at the Qing court, where it was appreciated for its documentary value, it was never regarded as "high art." Chinese art had long moved away from a representational style to one that privileged the personal expression of the individual artist over the representation of external appearances of nature.
One Jesuit artist in particular, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) who served under three Qing emperors including the Kangxi Emperor and his grandson, the Qianlong Emperor and even had a Chinese name, Lang Shining had a major impact on documentary painting at the Qing court. The Qianlong Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour scrolls were not painted by Castiglione, but the influence of his style is clearly evident and becomes especially salient when the Qianlong Emperor's tour scrolls are compared to the Kangxi Emperor's tour scrolls, which were painted about 70 years earlier.

The Qianlong Emperor's tour scrolls were begun in 1764 by the court artist Xu Yang (act. ca. 1750-after 1776), who was very much influenced by the European traditions of perspective and figural representation. Wang Hui, who began the Kangxi Emperor's tour scrolls in 1691, was one of the foremost painters of the Orthodox School, whose members dedicated themselves to the preservation of Chinese traditional culture by returning to the careful study of a canon of earlier Chinese masters. Thus, it is not surprising to compare the two sets of scrolls and find that they differ radically in their approach to the representation of space and the treatment of figures. A telling example is the comparison of two specific scrolls, the seventh scroll in the Kangxi Emperor's tour series and the sixth scroll in the Qianlong Emperor's tour series, which both feature the Grand Canal and the city of Suzhou.

In the Kangxi scroll, Wang Hui's figures are painted in a stylized, almost cartoon-like style that gives them a tremendous amount of buoyancy and expressive energy. The figures in the Qianlong scroll, on the other hand, are handled in a more European style and are anatomically more accurate, but they look stiff and posed, as though they are frozen in space and time. Xu Yang's figures are more three-dimensional in their representation, and therefore more "realistic" than their counterparts by Wang Hui, but, paradoxically, they actually seem to have less animation and life than Wang Hui's figures.

A comparison of the two artists' approaches to the representation of space in the tour scrolls reveals the limitations of translating the European style to the Chinese scroll format. Influenced by the Western technique of linear perspective, Xu Yang strives in the sixth Qianlong scroll to maintain a consistent vantage point in his representations of the Grand Canal and the route of the Qianlong Emperor into Suzhou. The Canal is presented as though the viewer were always looking from the east toward the west. But in order to maintain the consistency of this viewpoint, Xu Yang had to present Tiger Hill, one of the scenic highlights on this leg of the tour route, from the back rather than from the front, which would have been its characteristic and thus, more recognizable, view. In the seventh Kangxi scroll, on the other hand, Wang Hui had no problem reorienting the mountain to present it from its more characteristic frontal view, which is precisely the way a Chinese map maker would visualize a mountain. Xu Yang, in trying to maintain a consistent reference point based on linear perspective, could not reorient the mountain suddenly and show it from the other side. So again, as with the treatment of figures, the commitment to pictorial realism in fact became a limitation to the artist in significant ways. Though the European style added a certain kind of illusionary realism to the depiction of Qianlong's southern inspection tour, it could be argued that it also detracted from one of the most important functions of these scrolls as historical documents, which was to highlight the significance of the emperor's visit to important sites such as Tiger Hill and the Grand Canal.

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