Interview with Robert Jacobsen

Curator of Asian Art

1. How would you describe this Sung-style painting?

This fan painting is a good example of the natural approach to bird and flower painting that begins in the Northern Sung period and carries straight through into the Yüan Dynasty of the 14th century.

(1) The finch is accurately depicted.

It clearly depicts a finch—very identifiable if you know your birds.(1) It's perched on a citrus branch.

2. How can you tell it's citrus?

A botanist has told me that it's the little spines and thorns growing out of the stalk itself—as well as the type of leaf. We would know all that without even seeing the fruit here which is a type of Chinese grapefruit.

(2) The leaves are realistically detailed.

(3) The finch focuses on a moth.

Now what really interests me is the fact that we have leaves shown in a multitude of colors.(2) They've twisted and turned back on themselves in a realistic manner. There's even some decay here at the end of this leaf, and this leaf here—they've been eaten through by insects. In fact, speaking of insects, this finch is zeroing right in on a small moth over here.(3)

3. Is this just a straightforward depiction of nature?

(4) The moth, up close.

We're really looking at the forces of nature in a way, at least the food chain aspect of nature. It's a very specific moment in time. In other words, this artist has gone out at a specific time of the year, when fruit is most lush and at its ripest. The bird here has been very carefully observed; its plumage is very, very exact—its coloration quite correct. And it's doing what birds do—in this case looking for its next morsel—and here it is: the butterfly, fluttering away off the end of the fan itself.(4)

4. How does this painting fit into historical context—both in China and the rest of the world?

All of this has been painted on a neutral blank background, much of which is left blank. That's a pictorial device we've seen the Chinese using for at least a thousand years before this painting was executed. The idea of putting a profile or especially figures directly on a blank silk like this is something that has stayed with the Chinese.

But it's still, for all intents and purposes, an extraordinarily refined and exact rendering of observed nature. This is centuries in advance of what the West would do. It's not until we get to someone like Albrecht Dürer perhaps, in 16th century Germany, that someone has looked at and rendered nature with the specificity we see here in this painting.