A Textual Research On Wang Xuan's Two "Little Snow In A Fishing Village"

There are two paintings called Fishing Village with Light Snow by Wang Shen are now handed down in the world.One is now in the Beijing Palace Museum.The other is in the Taipei Palace Museum.They are both under the name of Wang Shen,and their compositions are basically the same.But their prefaces and postscripts as well as the records and documents later are different.The academia has always regarded the one in the Beijing Palace Museum as the only one authentic work of Wang Shen because it has the seals of the imperial storehouse of the Song Dynasty and the endorsements in ShouJinTi,as well as its comprehensive style is close to the school of Li Cheng’s painting and its circulation also seems orderly.It has always played an important role as the identification standard of other works of Wang Shen.Moreover,today’s scholars often regard it as a rare masterpiece of the school of Li Cheng’s painting as well as one of the representative works of the literati paintings in the Northern Song Dynasty,which is published in various common catalogues and highly praised.In recent years,there are much research works about the painting in the Beijing Palace Museum,but most of them focus on technique inheritance and painterliness of the painting,and barely involve the investigation of its authenticity.So this paper will figure out that the seals of Xuanhe on the painting in the Beijing Palace Museum may be a pseudograph of the later by combing and analyzing relevant literature,the prefaces and postscripts and the seals on the painting because firstly there are many doubts about the transmission of this painting before the Qing Dynasty and the postscript of Song Luo,which illustrated the painting was in the imperial palace through the ages,is unauthentic.And secondly,although the painting in the Beijing Palace Museum of Wang Shen has a similar style and format with other paintings in the Song Dynasty,there are also many doubts about it.So this paper will question the authenticity of Wang Shen’s work in the Beijing Palace Museum and then further analyze and discuss on this issue.And from the analysis and discussion,this paper will preliminarily infer that Wang Shen’s work in the Beijing Palace Museum actually may be an entrusted work in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty.In addition,the other painting Fishing Village with Light Snow,now in the Taipei Palace Museum,which is reported that was the work of Wang Shen,has been rarely mentioned and recorded in documents and catalogues all through the ages.This painting is different in not only the styles but also in the prefaces and postscripts as well as the records and documents later from the one in the Beijing Palace Museum.Is this painting in the Taipei Palace Museum the authentic work of Wang Shen?And what is the relationship between the two works of Wang Shen?Second,the document in the Qing Dynasty recorded that there were another painting Fishing Village with Light Snow by Dong Bangda,which was an imitation of Wang Shen’s work.So what is the relationship among this imitation work and the other two works of Wang Shen respectively?This paper will focus on and study the hand-down process of the two works of Wang Shen from the perspectives of the literature catalogues,preface and postscript and seals,and will contrastively analyze the styles and formats and the language of pen and ink of the two works,to clarify the relationships between the two versions of Wang Shen’s painting Fishing Village with Light Snow above,and to differentiate and analyze the authenticity and other relevant problems of the two works.