A HANDSCROLL OF CALLIGRAPHY IN CURSIVE SCRIPT OF 'HETAO SHI' BY ZHU YUNMING (1460-1526) MID MING DYNASTY

handscroll with a silk brocade wrapper, ink on silk, inscribed with eleven verses of Zhu Yunming's poem titled he tao shi ('in harmony with Tao Yuanming's Drinking Verses’), all inscribed in cursive script, signed by Zhu Yunming with three seals of the artists, together with three other seals of the collector

Collection of Cheng Zhengkui (1604-1676, seals).

Hosokawa Morisada Collection ten I – Kougana bunjinno sekai – Minshinno kaiga to shoseki, bunbougu [Morisada Hosokawa Collection exhibition I – The world of a refined writer – Paintings, calligraphy and stationery in Ming and Qing Dynasty], Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, 1992, cat. no. 52.

The title of the brocade wrapper has minor age damage, with minor loss to detail. There are age cracks, water/humidity mould stains throughout, particularly at the colophon. As visible in the catalogue photo, these stains are particularly prominent at the top of the silk, above the characters. There are cracks and losses to the surface where the calligraphy has been rubbed. The most severe area is visible in the final photo, obscuring characters in several columns of calligraphy.
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Zhu Yunming (1460-1526), zi Xizhe, was born with an extra finger (zhizhi in Chinese) in his right hand and thus called himself Zhishan and Zhizhisheng. He earned the juren degree in 1492, but he failed to advance further in the civil examinations and had an unsuccessful career in office. During the Zhengde reign (1505-21), he served as Magistrate of Xingning Prefecture in Guangdong and Prefect of Yingtian County, but retired to his hometown several years later to devote himself to poetry and literature. An avid reader, Zhu Yunming was a skilled poet and calligrapher, and his fame attracted followers of his poetry and artwork. As a calligrapher, he was adept at regular, running, cursive, and other scripts, and especially at wild cursive and small regular scripts. He first studied the calligraphic styles of the Jin and Tang periods and learnt from various masters without losing his authentic individuality. Unlike his contemporaries, he advocated archaism in calligraphy, proclaiming that one should “follow the Jin [masters] and travel with the Tang [masters]; maintain and do not lose [their tradition].” Zhu Yunming, Xu Zhenqing (1479-1511), Tang Yin (1470-1524), and Wen Zhengming (1470-1524) were known together as the Four Talents of Wuzhong. Zhu was also the author of 60 volumes of poetry and over 100 volumes of miscellaneous writings.

The famous Jin-dynasty poet Tao Yuanming (c. 365-427) wrote a cycle of 20 poems on drinking alcohol. These poems came to be widely admired by later writers, who composed their own after Tao’s rhyme scheme. The Song-dynasty poet Su Shi (1037-1101) was especially fond of Tao’s works and wrote over 100 poems after his rhymes. Su’s brother Su Che (1039-1112) also wrote close to 50 poems after Tao. Zhu Yunming wrote that “I am by nature dull and slow and have gained an undeserved reputation. Within two years I visited the capital three times.  My interest in travel waned in the shadow of wind and dust. In my boat I have a collection of Su Shi and his brother's poems after Tao’s rhymes. I chanted them alone by lamplight at night. When I read the twenty poems on drinking, I was overcome with melancholy, and so I haphazardly wrote another poetic cycle using the same rhyme scheme.” For details, see Haoduan wanxiang: Zhu Yunming shufa tezhan / Myriad Forms in the Tip of a Brush: The Art of Calligraphy by Zhu Yunming, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 2013, cat. no. 22. In 1499, at the age of 40, Zhu Yunming was overcome by emotion when he came across Su Shi and Su Che’s poems after Tao Yuanming’s and was inspired to write 20 poems himself after Tao’s rhymes. Apparently quite content with his own compositions, Zhu Yunming would copy them repeatedly in his calligraphy. The present handscroll is a cursive-script rendition of the eleven poems in Zhu’s cycle. Throughout the work, Zhu’s brushwork is unrestrained, decisive, forceful, and with many subtle variations. The postscript to this piece of calligraphy suggests that it was probably completed no later than a year or two after the poems. For Zhu Yunming’s other renditions of poems after Tao Yuanming, see the 1525 album in small regular and clerical cursive scripts, Poems After Tao Yuanming’s Drinking Poems, at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, ibid.; or the scroll Twenty Poems After Tao Yuanming’s Drinking Poems in large cursive script, published in Shodō zenshū [Complete volumes of calligraphy], vol. 17: Chūgoku [China] 12: gen, min [Yuan and Ming], Tokyo, 1967, pp. 74-75, 174.

“Jiuchou,” mentioned in the preface, may be the same person who requested from Zhu Zhishan a cursive rendition of Xie Zhuang’s Moon Rhapsody in 1525. In his postscript to the latter work, Zhu Zhishan writes, “After our drinking together, Jiuchou laid out some sutra paper to ask me for calligraphy, and so I carelessly wrote this. It was a pleasure writing Xie Zhuang, but the old paper ran out, just as my calligraphic training has its limits.” Thus we know that Jiuchou once requested calligraphy from Zhu Yunming during a drinking party. This piece is published in Haoduan wanxiang, op.cit., cat. no. 59.

The present lot probably once belonged to Cheng Zhengkui (1604-76), zi Duanbo, hao Juling, also known as Qingxi daoren, Qingxi laoren, and Qingxi jiushi. He attained the jinshi degree in 1631 and served successively as Vice Minister of Works, Compiler of the Hanlin Academy, Chief Minister of the Office of Seals. During the Qing Dynasty, he served as Vice Minister of Works before retiring from office to Nanjing. He was a skilled painter, calligrapher, poet, and writer. He was adept at landscape painting and regular-script calligraphy.