Social status and art collecting: the collections of Shen Zhou and Wang Zhen

Whether a collection was of uniformly high quality or not, it could serve to familiarize the owner and other viewers with certain characteristic features of the different personal styles of artists and the impressive array of earlier traditions to which they alluded during this era. At a time when the only reproductions were rubbings from engraved stones or wood-block prints and there were no public museums, even the less successful works of an artist and close forgeries had an educational value. Connoisseurship in the Chinese and European traditions has emphasized fine distinctions, but being able to recognize more basic differences also requires considerable knowledge.

In the past, most art historians would have been interested in evidence of collecting practices only for those who were important patrons and connoisseurs, because of their more obvious contributions to the careers of major artists. We shall have a much fuller picture of the environment in which painters lived and worked when we know more about the extent to which different social groups purchased paintings or exchanged them as gifts and the ways in which they related to painters. Moreover, by studying participants at lower levels of society, we can gain a better understanding of the role of art objects and artists in these people's lives.

One question worth asking is why Wang Zhen was able to acquire paintings by such renowned artists from near and far. Was it just a matter of luck that he obtained works that once belonged to a man who evidently associated with quite a few leading artists? I think that the answer instead is that many works were in circulation because painting played an important role in the lives of numerous members of the educated elite - being used to create commemorative gifts for a wide variety of occasions and being practiced at various levels of competence by amateurs as well as professionals.(132) As Du Qiong said regarding Xia Chang, an official who painted as an amateur, even people in the countryside knew of his bamboo paintings because he used them in the exchange of social courtesies. In addition, scroll paintings and album leaves are quite portable objects; they could be sent long distances as gifts or a special type of correspondence, or packed with luggage by recipients such as Zheng Jun who traveled extensively. As a result, there were probably many collections in fifteenth-century China that were fairly representative of contemporary artistic.trends.

Cahill might counter that although there may have been many collections containing modest works dashed off quickly to meet the demand for small tokens of esteem, there were probably far fewer filled with works in which the artists had invested more of their time and creativity.(133) Yet being functional per se does not determine whether a work was painted with care or not, as Cahill himself has argued eloquently,(134) and many outstanding paintings were done for special occasions in Ming China, as we have become increasingly aware. The anonymous parting scroll in Wang's collection [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7, 8 OMITTED] includes elements often found in paintings serving this function, but it was done with sensitivity, not hastily or without thought, and deserves serious consideration as a work by a leading Zhe School artist of this era.