r the
hero and the foreground--hence the dominant study of the nude, and the
tendency to thronged compositions, with dramatic motives of effort and
conflict. The Chinese artists, weak in the plastic, weak in the
architectural sense, paint mostly in a lyric mood, with a contemplative
ideal. Hence the value given to space in their designs, the
semi-religious passion for nature, and the supremacy of landscape.
Beauty is found not only in pleasant prospects, but in wild solitudes,
rain, snow and storm. The life of things is contemplated and portrayed
for its own sake, not for its uses in the life of men. From this point
of view the body of Chinese painting is much more modern in conception
than that of Western art. Landscape was a mature and free art in China
more than a thousand years ago, and her school of landscape is the
loftiest yet known to the world. Nor was man ever dissociated from
nature. As early as the 4th century Ku K'ai-chih says that in painting a
certain noble character he must give him a fit background of great peaks
and deep ravines. Chinese painting, in sum, finely complements rather
than poorly supplements that of Europe; where the latter is strong, it
is weak; but in certain chosen provinces it long ago found consummate
expression for thoughts and feelings scarcely yet expressed with us.

History: Early periods (to A.D. 618).

The origin of Chinese painting is lost in legend, though there is no
reason to doubt its great antiquity. References in literature prove that
by the 3rd century B.C. it was a developed art. To this period is
ascribed the invention of the hair-brush, in the use of which as an
instrument both for writing and drawing the Chinese have attained
marvellous skill; the usual material for the picture being woven silk,
or, less often and since the 1st century A.D., paper. In early times
wood panels were employed; and large compositions were painted on walls
prepared with white lime. These mural decorations have all disappeared.
History and portraiture seem to have been the prevailing subjects; a
secular art corresponding to the social ideals of Confucianism. Yet long
before the introduction of Buddhism (A.D. 67) with its images and
pictures, we find that the two great symbolic figures of the Chinese
imagination, the Tiger and the Dragon--typifying the forces of Nature
and the power of the Spirit--had been evolved in art; and to imaginative
minds the mystic ideas of Lao Tzue and the leg