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Subject:Re: Is this possible?
Posted By: rat Mon, May 15, 2017
Sorry for the delayed reply. This morning I had a chance to check the compendia of Chinese paintings in museums and prominent private collections around the world that are published in various iterations of 中国绘画综合图录. There wasn't anything by Zhang Cong listed, so there aren't any plausible new candidates to add to the sample of one that we have via Cahill. (I wonder how we know that it is indeed by Zhang; Cahill wasn't infallible.)
I expect that you have a decent anonymous picture to which the signature of Wang Chong was copied from a piece of his calligraphy. At first I thought it was a Qing (Chinese) painting (possibly it is), but now think--given its subtle color, the scale of the figure and pine bark relative to the overall painting, their positioning in the close foreground, the patterning of tonality in the pine needles, and the elimination of depth created by the juxtaposition of the lowest tree branch against the hut's roof and the supposedly receding background behind it--that this may instead be a nice anonymous Japanese painting.
The real issue is that after looking at the painting Cahill ascribes to Wang Chong I just can't see any stylistic similarities between them. It's certainly true that some real virtuosos (Zhao Mengfu say, or Zhang Daqian) could create great paintings in several radically different styles of coloring, composition, brushwork, etc, it seems just too far a stretch to believe that the person who did the stubbly yet effectively descriptive Yuan-style brushwork to depict the austere landscape in Cahill's book is the same person who painted a radically different composition, with more polished and more conventionalized brushwork, in pleasing color that counterbalances some of the patterned repetitiveness of the monochrome brushstrokes but otherwise contributes little directly in and of itself. (...particularly when Wang wasn't known for his paintings and there aren't any other examples to compare yours to)
Which is not to say that your painting is a bad painting: it's visually stimulating and decently rendered. I just don't see how anything but its inscription (and seal) relates to Wang Chong. Would be nice though!
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