Popularization And Elegance Of The Sketch Paintings

The study on the painting art of the Song Dynasty occupies an outstanding position at Chinese brushwork history. The small and exquisite sketch painting has been considered to be a special flower among the Song paintings for its great number and consummate craft. It not only built an artistic monument of Song painting, but also provided valuable images to understand tastes of aesthetics, social conventions and popularities, cultural meanings during the Song Period. In order to read the Song social culture, this thesis focused on the sketch painting and employed methods of document analysis, comparison and statistics to study the sketch painting including shape and structure, subject and content, market requirement, literary information and humanity, and so on. This study mainly comprises three parts:firstly, the Introductory Part involves the analysis and discussion on the social and cultural settings of Song Dynasty and revealed the depending social scene for the development and flourishing of sketch painting; secondly, the Former Part deals with the study on the shape and structure, subject and content, market requirement of sketch painting and anatomizing the fan culture, general public tendency of painting creation and commercialization of paintings in order to disclose the secular tendency of Song social culture; thirdly, the Latter Part concerns the literary and humanism information of the sketch paintings and discusses their cultured character and humanism feature, with the purpose of unraveling the elegance of Song social culture. The amalgamation of general public taste and elegance of literator and scholar-bureaucrat in the sketch painting, performed a duet of secular and elegant cultures of the Song Dynasty, which not only reflected the transition of creating style and artistic taste in Song paintings, but also lively and vividly indicated the social and cultural change of the Song Period. The cultural duet of common custom and grace indicate that the Song Culture formed ultimately, which exhibits distinct contrast with the noble culture of the Tang Dynasty.