'ART & SOUL
A scholar’s studio

Ink-stones, the most prized possession of a Chinese scholar, were carved, decorated and inscribed with poetry, writes B. N. Goswamy

"The stone craftsmen of Tuan-chou are as skilled as the gods, (they) stepped up to the sky, sharpened their knives and cut the purple clouds." — Li Ho, 9th century Chinese poet

THESE wonderfully evocative words, in praise as much of the purple stone found in Tuan as of the skill of the craftsmen of that region, relate essentially to objects like the delicately made ink-stones without which no scholar’s studio in China was complete. We in India have very little idea of the appearance that scholars’ studios, if anything like them existed at all, bore here.

A few images, mostly Mughal, showing the inside of a painting workshop with artists at work, have survived, but there is nothing — in contrast to the situation in early China — to fall back upon for knowing what an individual scholar or artist’s studio might have looked like. From that ancient land, on the other hand, we have extensive accounts, and I feel greatly drawn to them.

In their essence, scholars’ studios were related to the great literati tradition of China, the literati, to whom so much that has survived of Chinese culture owes itself, being scholars: educated men in a society in which the majority were illiterate or semiliterate. Most of them came from modest families and had spent the earlier part of their lives occupying official positions, but in each of them there survived an "urgently felt need to escape from the everyday world`85in order to be free to cultivate the self", as James Watt put it. But to be remembered is the fact that "by the time most of them escaped, the fastidiousness of bureaucratic life and the sophistication and refinement of Chinese society" had become part of them.

Here, in his studio, a scholar — routinely trained in Chinese classics — took time out to formulate an encyclopaedic view of life, "in which art played a decisive role, and everything, from calligraphy to water tasting, collecting ancient bronzes and the shape of qins, or zithers, was a link in the great chain of being." This was no ordinary place, but a place for calm contemplation, a haven into which the head of the household could withdraw in order to quietly follow his intellectual and artistic pursuits, unmindful of the difficulties and concerns of daily life. But this retreat, or reclusion, it needs to be added, represented — as in our own ashrams in India — a morally positive rather than negative course of action, for when the whole world seemed to have "gone awry", it is here that the Great Way could be preserved and stood up for.

In his studio, according to available accounts, the scholar studied Confucian classics, wrote poetry, played music, practised calligraphy, and perhaps painted. Whatever else he surrounded himself with — hanging scrolls, beautiful rocks, old artefacts, favourite musical instruments — the most essential things for the scholar were his tools, among them the "four treasures": ink, brushes, paper, and ink-stone. Each of them was chosen with the greatest of cares, and elaborate descriptions of some of these have come down. The ink, used as much for painting as for calligraphy, and made chiefly from pine soot, was ordinarily kept in the form of ink sticks that were ground with water on the ink-stone to produce liquid ink, yielding the artist/scholar complete control over the density, texture and quality of his ink and, by extension, the textural and tonal variations in his work. It was, however, the ink-stone — the kind spoken of in Li Ho’s verse cited above — that was the most prized possession of a scholar. For, even if created for the utilitarian purpose of grinding ink sticks, deep spiritual meaning came often to be attached to these stones. They represented the essence of heaven and earth to the scholar, a microcosm of the universe as it were. And highly treasured ink-stones have survived, carved and decorated, inscribed with poetry and lines of prose that sometimes echo the mystic relation of water and ink with stone that defined poetic thought and evoked painted images.

Then, of course, there were the brush pots which, like the ink-stones, reflected the scholar’s refinement, decorated as they were with literati subject matter, inscribed with poetry, bearing the signatures and seals of their makers. These pots were made of a variety of materials: wood, bamboo, porcelain, lacquer, even jade. In them, the preference seems to have been for objects done in ‘organic taste’, with the mellow colours of carved bamboo, the unusual grains of waxed hardwood, and the natural forms found in nature, being most appreciated.

Clearly, we speak here of a different order of world: simple, close to nature, aesthetically truly refined. It is the quality of objects in which all this was reflected — rare perfection of craftsmanship, combined with harmony of form and decoration — that seduced someone like Alfred Baur, the distinguished Swiss collector, who amassed a vast number of Chinese and Japanese objets d’art and left them — the celebrated Baur collection named after him and his wife, Eugenie — to the city of Geneva in 1951. Baur had made his money in Sri Lanka, manufacturing organic fertilisers and acquiring huge tea plantations, and it was not until 1906 when he returned to Switzerland that he began to collect Far-Eastern art. But once he did, he became totally involved, besotted as it were with the qualities of that art.

Of Chinese ceramics alone, there were 756 pieces in his collection, one of them being the brush pot that accompanies this note. There are rocks here, painted in a style of the Master of the Rocks, and on it one sees a continuous landscape that seems never to end: water that laps nobly, an island with a pavilion perhaps of the kind that a scholar would have loved to live in, a boat that symbolises a crossing.

A scholar inheriting this brush pot would have got lost in its form and the images. But one can also imagine him contemplating the pot on a quiet evening and wondering: what brushes must have stood in this pot once, and what words or images emanated from them?

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