Most of the great Chinese paintings spend their lives rolled up in the dark, unrolled for a few weeks and then put away for years. The twelve here survived fire, looting and an emperor's wrong guess, and several still owe their painter's name to notes added by later hands.
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How These Were Chosen
Chinese painters used the brush and ink they also wrote with, on silk or on paper. Color was optional, and the areas left bare often stand for water, mist or sky.
Most paintings were mounted as scrolls. A handscroll lies on a table and opens from right to left, an arm's length at a time, so the viewer moves through it as along a road. A hanging scroll goes on a wall and is seen all at once.
Light wears silk down, which explains those long years in storage. Only paintings famous for centuries made this list, so nothing comes from the twentieth century, and they run from the least known outside China to the most celebrated.
12. Muqi, Six Persimmons (13th century)
Six persimmons sit in a loose row across a sheet of paper, with no table, no shadow and no horizon beneath them. The one in the center is a flat wash of dark ink, three others are laid down in lighter grays, and the two at the ends are nothing more than an ink outline around untouched paper. Yet neither of those white fruits looks lighter than the black one in the middle.
The scroll is attributed to Muqi, a Chinese monk of the Chan school of Buddhism, active in the 13th century under the Southern Song. Chan is the school that Japan later called Zen. Muqi kept the same economy down to the stems, short, hard strokes closer to handwriting than to drawing.
The persimmons crossed the sea in the 15th or 16th century. Their first known Japanese owners, the Tsuda, a merchant family of the port city of Sakai, hung the scroll in the tokonoma, the display alcove of a tea room, for the few hours a tea gathering lasted, then rolled it up again.
It has stayed in that circle ever since. The abbot Kogetsu Sogan, son of a Sakai tea master from the same family, founded Ryokoin, a subtemple of the Daitokuji monastery in Kyoto, in 1606, and the scroll still belongs to it. The temple is closed to the public, and the persimmons left Japan for the first time only in 2023, for three weeks in San Francisco.
In China, Muqi's economy had not pleased the critics. In 1365, Xia Wenyan, a writer of the Yuan dynasty, called his brushwork coarse in his survey of Chinese painters, Tuhui baojian, and said it lacked the ancient methods.
Japan read the same ink very differently. There, Muqi's name became a byword for Chinese painting, and the brushwork Xia Wenyan had found coarse became a model for Japanese painters.
At a Glance
Artist: Attributed to Muqi (Chinese, active 13th century)
Date: 13th century, Southern Song dynasty
Medium: Ink on paper, hanging scroll
Size: not published
Where to see it: Ryokoin, a subtemple of Daitokuji, Kyoto (rarely on display)
11. Giuseppe Castiglione, One Hundred Horses (1728)
Two tall pine trees open the scroll, and beyond them a hundred horses spread along a riverbank. Some graze, some are led to pasture, one is washed at the water's edge and a group wades across the river. The man who arranged them, Giuseppe Castiglione, was an Italian Jesuit born in Milan in 1688 and trained as a European painter.
In 1724 the Yongzheng emperor asked him for a subject Chinese painters had handled for centuries, on Chinese silk, with Chinese brushes, and Castiglione had to decide how much of Europe the emperor would accept.