Traditional Painting: Five Old Men of Suiyang

Today, we’re going to talk about a traditional Chinese painting of the Northern Song Dynasty from more than 1,000 years ago. Done by an unknown painter and circulated primarily among family members, the portraiture has miraculously stood the test of time and harvested the imprints of a who’s who of historical figures.

Transcript

Traditional Painting: Five Old Men of Suiyang

Today, we’re going to talk about a traditional Chinese painting of the Northern Song Dynasty from more than 1,000 years ago. Done by an unknown painter and circulated primarily among family members, the portraiture has miraculously stood the test of time and harvested the imprints of a who’s who of historical figures.

In late November, the State Council, China’s cabinet, released a plan to ramp up vaccination among the nation’s elderly population in order to better protect this vulnerable group against COVID-19. The plan aims to leverage the protective effect of vaccination to reduce the risk of severe or critical illness and death among infected seniors.

The plan supports efforts to ensure precise research and management, further improve relevant services, and enhance supervision regarding vaccination work among the elderly. It especially aims to improve the vaccination rate among people 80 and up but hasn’t forgotten those between 60 and 79, which by the way includes yours truly.

As you know, China has the world’s largest total population, which means it also has the largest population of seniors. Statistics from China’s seventh population census showed that the country’s 2020 population exceeded 1.41 billion in which there are 264 million people aged 60 and over, making up 18.7 percent of the total population. And with the development of China’s healthcare system, population aging has accelerated in the last decade compared with the previous period. According to the World Health Organization, the population of people over 60 is expected to reach 28 percent by 2040, due to longer life expectancy and declining fertility rates. 

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion over the raising of the retirement age, and it’s taken as a given that elderly people will play an increasingly important role in China’s society and economy either in social governance, business operations, technological research, or artistic creation, which leads us to the painting we’re going to talk about today.

While portraiture is considered to be the most prevalent genre in western painting, it is relatively less well known in traditional Chinese painting, where landscapes are the predominant genre. One notable exception, however, is the Five Old Men of Suiyang from the Northern Song Dynasty, which existed from 960 to 1129.

What makes it stand out is not only the painting itself, but more of what happened during the 1,000 years of its circulation.

It is easy to tell from its name that the painting is the portrait of five old men from a place called Suiyang. Suiyang was the alternate capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, which is in present-day Shangqiu of central China’s Henan Province. The Northern Song Dynasty is one of the dynasties with the highest level of economic and cultural development in Chinese history.

The Five Old Men are five retired senior officials, including the 94-year-old Bi Shichang 毕世长, 90-year-old Wang Huan 王焕, 88-year-old Zhu Guan 朱贯, 87-year-old Feng Ping 冯平, and 80-year-old Du Yan 杜衍. All of them used to hold minister-level positions, and one was even prime minister. They led a comfortable life of retirement in Suiyang, composing and chanting poems together. Their portrait was made by an unknown painter on a scroll in the year 1056. 

Qian Mingyi, one of Du Yan’s protégés, later wrote a preface for the painting to describe the leisurely and contented ambiance of the five old men’s gathering. The preface and the painting complemented each other, adding to its artistic value. It’s just unfortunate that Qian didn’t record the name of that painter.

Despite the painter’s anonymity, his painting skills are exceptional. The sensitive delineations of the features in contrast to the thick shaded brush lines of the garments reflect the conventions of official portraiture. Each portrait shows considerable attention to facial details, and the figures were depicted in a formal standing pose, indicative of each man’s virtue.

The Five Old Men of Suiyang stands as a “wonder” of traditional Chinese portrait painting for at least three distinctive features.

To start with, most of traditional Chinese paintings that have been handed down over the centuries were done by famous painters, while very few anonymous paintings could stand the test of such a long time. Surprisingly, the Five Old Men of Suiyang has not only been passed down from generation to generation, but it has also even given birth to several copied versions by artists from the Ming Dynasty some 400 years later. What is interesting is that while the original version is done by an unknown painter, the copied versions are all done by well-known painters. For example, one copied version, which is currently collected at the Shanghai Museum, is a masterpiece by the famous Ming painter You Qiu 尤求.

Second, the way in which the Five Old Men has been circulated is rather unusual. Traditional masterpieces were in general collected either by the imperial court or by private collectors. For example, many of the Five Old Men’s contemporaries were collected by Emperor Huizong, who reigned from 1100 to 1126. In the Ming Dynasty, many of these collections made it into the hands of private collectors. And then in the Qing Dynasty, especially during the reign of Emperor Qianlong, they flowed back into the imperial court. Emperor Qianlong, as was his habit, applied quite a few official stamps and personal seals on these collection items to express his appreciation. With the decline of the Qing Dynasty, however, many of these imperial collections were lost, either stolen by the eunuchs or looted by foreign invaders.

However, the Five Old Men has been circulated primarily among the descendants  of those revered gentlemen, which is very similar to how western portrait paintings are passed down. As I mentioned, the individuals depicted in the Five Old Men were all high-ranking officials, and many of their descendants were also famous scholars and dignitaries of their time. They all hoped to preserve the portrait of their predecessors as a family heritage, but it was impossible to separate one scroll into five for collection. Therefore, several copies emerged. One postscript recorded the anecdote of how the descendants of the Bi family funded a set of copies and returned the original to the descendants of the Zhu family. There have been altogether six complete copies, of which three have survived till today.

Third, the star-studded prefaces and postscripts attached to the Five Old Men make it one of the most extensively documented paintings in the history of Chinese art. Prefaces and postscripts are a special feature of traditional Chinese paintings. Those who have viewed a painting would record their observations, appreciation, as well as judgement for its authenticity in the form of a preface or a postscript.

From 1056 to 1898, more than 100 heavyweight political figures, literary giants, painters, and calligraphers have written prefaces and postscripts for it. Those include 18 most prominent statesman and men of letters of the five old men’s contemporaries in the Song Dynasty, including Ouyang Xiu欧阳修, Fan Zhongyan范仲淹, Su Shi苏轼, and Huang Tingjian黄庭坚, just to name a few.

In fact, so many prefaces and postscripts have made the painting scroll rather long. For a short period during the early years of the Qing Dynasty, it was out of the hands of the descendants of the five old men. Later, when it was redeemed by descendants of the Zhu family, it was rebound into several volumes.

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the painting was once again out of the hands of the descendants and was collected by Di Xuegeng 狄学耕, a county magistrate in Jiangxi Province. His superior, surveillance commissioner Wang Xiaxuan 王霞轩, was a man of evil intent who tried every means to seize the painting. Wang told a tale that the countrymen under Di’s jurisdiction were plotting a rebellion and troops would be sent to suppress it unless Di was willing to give up the painting. To protect his countrymen, Di reluctantly handed over the painting. Wang presented the painting to statesman and military leader Zuo Zongtang 左宗棠to flatter him. Zuo, a connoisseur of calligraphy and painting, liked it and wrote a postscript for it. But he thought it was better for the painting to be preserved by the families of the five old men and ordered Wang to return it. Wang, however, sold it to a member of the royal family and made a substantial fortune from it.

After the death of that royal family member, the painting was lost into the antiques market. Later the painting was split into three parts by antique dealers and sold to galleries in the United States. Among them, the portrait of Bi Shichang 毕世长and some of the preface and postscript volumes are preserved at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; the portraits of Zhu Guan 朱贯and Du Yan 杜衍are collected at the Yale University Art Gallery; while those of Wang Huan 王焕and Feng Ping 冯平were collected at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Fortunately, some volumes of prefaces and postscripts were left in China and collected by a businessman named Sun Yufeng 孙煜峰. In 1964, to commemorate the successful explosion of China’s first atomic bomb, Sun donated more than 40 paintings and calligraphies to the Shanghai Museum, including the remaining parts of the Five Old Men.

Although it is difficult for the Five Old Men of Suiyang to reunite in China, the stories imbued in its prefaces and postscripts, as well as the traditional values as represented by the strong family ties reflected in its inheritance over the centuries have been and will be passed down over generations.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Song Yimin, translator Yang Guang, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.