Ma Yuan

Chinese painter

• Born: c. 1165
• Birthplace: He Zhong, Shanxi, China
• Died: c. 1225
• Place of death: Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China

Together with his somewhat younger contemporary, Xia Gui, Ma Yuan formed the Ma-Xia school of Chinese painting. In some ways, the school served as the prototype for Chinese landscape painting and heavily influenced both Chinese and Japanese painters.

Early Life

Ma Yuan (mah yew-ahn) belonged to what was probably the most prolific and distinguished family of painter-scholars in Chinese history. Altogether, seven members of his family served the Northern and Southern Song imperial families. This service lasted from the time of Yuan’s great-grandfather Ma Fen in the late eleventh century, to that of his son Ma Lin in the mid-thirteenth century. Besides Yuan, the Ma artists included his great-grandfather, Fen; his grandfather, Xiongzu; Shirong, his father; Gongxian, an uncle; Kui, his brother; and his son Lin. Each of them received accolades from the imperial court, but unquestionably Ma Yuan became the most famous, and his legacy was the most profound.

Despite the acclaim that surrounded the Ma painters, little is known about their personal lives, and exact dates for their professional careers are generally missing. In part, the absence of such information reflects the turbulence of the times in which they lived. Ma Fen painted at a time when the Chinese rulers of the Northern Song Dynasty (Sung; 960-1127) were conspiring with a Tungusic people, the Jurchen, to end the Khitan control over northern China. Although this alliance did manage to displace the Khitans in 1126, the subsequent rupture between the Song and the Jurchen resulted in a further loss of territory and a rather ignominious Chinese retreat to the south. The imperial court abandoned the capital, Gaifeng, and moved to Hangzhou at the mouth of the Zhe estuary in the Yangtze area. Although Hangzhou became the most beautiful of Chinese capitals, the sting of losing northern China to “barbarians” marked the Southern Song era (1127-1279) in Chinese eyes as less than respectable. One Chinese critic, for example, has said that Ma’s “incomplete” paintings were a reflection of a “divided and less than complete empire.”

During Ma Yuan’s lifetime, the Southern Song was in even further military retreat, a time when Genghis Khan was forming the Mongol nation and setting it on the path toward world conquest. The Mongols would become the first foreigners in Chinese history to conquer all China, and the Southern Song would bear the stigma of being the first dynasty to have lost all China to a “barbarian” conqueror.

Despite the Southern Song’s so-called military weakness, a point that many Western scholars claim has been exaggerated by Chinese historians, the dynasty was a glorious and sophisticated one. During the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Hangzhou was probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world, and the imperial Chinese court surrounded itself with scholars, historians, poets, and painters. Neo-Confucianism flourished, and poetry and prose of great excellence abounded. The wealthy lived luxurious and generally tranquil lives.

It was in such a milieu that Ma Yuan worked. No doubt he was highly literate and something of a scholar, as were most of the court dignitaries of that period. If the reign of the Southern Song was not known as a great military period of Chinese history, it was certainly one of the most enlightened in terms of scholarship and governmental support of artists. Thus, Ma Yuan received numerous awards, such as the Golden Girdle, and was artist-in-attendance at the imperial court.

The earliest suggested painting by Ma Yuan purportedly dates from the reign of Gaozong (Kao-tsung; r. 1127-1162), although such an early date is unlikely. At the latest, Ma was said to have still been artist-in-attendance during the reign of Lizong (Li-tsung; r. 1225-1264). Certainly he was very active during the reign of Ningzong (Ning-tsung; r. 1195-1224), receiving as he did the patronage of the empress Yang and her family. This patronage is verified by several seals bearing the empress Yang’s name, together with inscriptions on Ma Yuan’s paintings. These inscriptions not only offer some of the very few concrete dates connected to Ma Yuan but also corroborate the generally held view that Ma’s career was principally that of a court painter.

Life’s Work

Ma Yuan’s paintings offer a glimpse of court life in Hangzhou. Many of the works attributed to him depict favorite aristocratic pastimes, such as nighttime entertainment in a villa or scenes from the panoramic West Lake. However, Ma Yuan was much more than a reflection of the grandeur of the Song court. Consciously or not, he began a style unique to him and his younger contemporary, Xia Gui, which would make his career a watershed in the history of Chinese art.

In addition to his nicknames Qinshan (Ch’in-shan) and He Zhong (Ho Chung; the latter indicating that he was from He Zhong, Shanxi Province), Ma was also known as “One-Cornered Ma.” The latter name reveals the innovative aspects of Ma’s career. “One corner” refers to a tendency in many of Ma’s works to emphasize one corner of a scene. This was described by some Chinese critics as “leaning to one corner,” or being, therefore, incomplete.

Ma’s one-corner emphasis may have been a reflection of Daoist beliefs concerning the illusory nature of appearances; certainly, mood and imagination are more important in his art than is detailed reproduction. Critics and detractors of Ma Yuan’s style and paintings often refer to his lyric and poetic qualities. Empty spaces are, in his works, opportunities for the viewer’s imagination to soar.

Ma’s one-cornered style calls to mind the approach of the great Daoist historian of the Early Han Dynasty, Sima Qian (145-86 b.c.e.), who often narrated a biography of a particular subject from the narrow perspective of the subject himself and left other perspectives to the biographies of the subject’s contemporaries. In a sense, this too was a one-cornered approach. One final explanation for Ma’s style is that, as part of China was occupied by a “barbarian” state, the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234), the Southern Song constituted only a corner of the true Chinese empire and was, therefore, incomplete.

Regardless of whether Ma’s peculiar quirk was a political statement or a philosophical expression, the result resembles the work of a photographer who consciously blurs all but the focal point of a shot. In Ma Yuan, this technique was executed with great subtlety, and it endowed his paintings with an almost eerie sense of transience.

Not all aspects of Ma Yuan’s style were original. Like Xia Gui, Ma often used what has been described as the ax-stroke method of depicting rocky mountains. This technique, which is generally attributed to the great Northern Song painter Li Tang (Li T’ang), has been described as “hacking out the angular facets of rocks with the side of the brush.” Sharp contours can be seen elsewhere in Ma Yuan’s works, and critics have referred to his “exact severity” and use of a “squeezed brush” to define leaves. Furthermore, the seemingly restless movement of water in many of his works is often said to be typical of the fighting-water technique. Although precedents for all but the one-cornered style can be found, the combinations that Ma used emerge as singularly his.

His works, often in the form of fans, album leaves, and (less frequently) scrolls, painted in ink with traces of color, can be found in numerous museums around the world. In the United States, paintings by Ma Yuan and very close Ming copies of his work are located in the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fogg Museum, and the Freer Gallery. Many more of his works hang in Japanese galleries. The reason for this is his great popularity during the Ashikaga period (Muromachi; 1336-1573) in Japan. Unfortunately, it is also a consequence of Japanese collectors’ helping themselves during their country’s wartime occupation of China. In China, the majority of Ma’s works available for viewing are in either the Beijing or the Taipei palace museums. A major problem for those wishing to examine his art lies in the fact that forgeries and imitations are common, and not a few of the paintings bearing his name were done by his students or by later admirers. With a few exceptions, however, art experts have been able to distinguish the genuine works from imitations with considerable confidence.

Significance

The impact of Ma Yuan on subsequent Chinese painting was slow in developing. In some measure, this was a result of Chinese art critics’ characterizing Ma and Xia Gui as belonging to the Northern school of painting at a time when the Southern school was considered to be the proper school for China’s literati. Such distinctions were social as much as they were aesthetic; the professional court painters were criticized in contrast to the literati, who pursued painting strictly as a gentlemanly hobby. Furthermore, the Ma-Xia school was sometimes derided as being an academic school whose style was easily learned. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), however, interest in Ma Yuan and appreciation of his worth began to develop.

Even before the Ming resurrection of the Ma-Xia school, the Japanese had begun to admire these two painters and their school. Because the paintings were not yet highly collectible and therefore could be acquired without great difficulty, the Japanese brought back numerous fine examples of both painters, particularly during the shogunates of Yoshimitsu (1358-1408) and Yoshimasa (1435-1490) of the Ashikaga period. The Ma-Xia school has remained popular in Japan to this day. Moreover, in recent years Western critics have come to consider Ma Yuan and Xia Gui as the best of the Chinese landscape painters. An interesting development is that Chinese critics may be taking their cue from Japan and the West in elevating Ma to the highest echelon of China’s artistic pantheon.

Bibliography

Barnhart, Richard M., et al. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. The chapter “The Five Dynasties and the Song Period (907-1279)” discusses the Ma-Xia painters. This oversize book includes beautiful color plates and a helpful glossary.

Cahill, James. Chinese Painting. New York: Rizzoli International, 1977. Contains a chapter devoted to Ma Yuan, Xia Gui, and Ma Lin, with examples of their work.

Cahill, James. An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings: T’ang, Sung, and Yuan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Contains a lengthy list of paintings attributed to Xia Gui that are located in museums and private collections.

Edwards, Richard. “Ma Yuan.” In Sung Biographies, edited by Herbert Franke. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Franz Steiner, 1976. The most detailed discussion of Ma Yuan in English, with an excellent discussion of Ma’s impact on Chinese art.

Fong, Wen C., and James Watt. Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996. Informative discussions of the Ma-Xia school and its artists, especially in the chapter on the Imperial Painting Academy of the Song Dynasty. Beautifully illustrated with examples of paintings by the Ma-Xia artists.

Lee, Sherman. Chinese Landscape Painting. 1954. Reprint. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1962. Contains examples of Xia’s art, together with a brief critique of his technique.

Loehr, Max. The Great Painters of China. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Contains a very brief sketch of Xia Gui’s life and an excellent discussion of his technique. Also has several photographs of Xia’s paintings.

Sullivan, Michael. The Arts of China. 4th ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Contains a brief passage about Ma Yuan and Xia Gui with examples of their work.