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of incorruptness. The last name of Ho Chung's studio was T’ing-yü-hsien, that is, a pavilion for listening to the rain. The melancholy atmosphere of a rainy day, from the point-of-view of Chinese literary life, has been a special but poetic mood favoured by poets of Sung China in the 13th century. Transferring this sad feeling of listening to the rain as one of Ho Chung's studio names showed that this late 19th century Kwangtung artist certainly shared the Sung poets' feeling of melancholy.
With regard to Ho Chung's biography, due to the lack of information his life as an artist is not completely clear, although according to an art history written in 1927 and devoted to Chinese artists in Kwangtung, Ho Chung was over seventy years old when he died. Based on this clue, the chronology of this artist can be ascertained in general. There are 34 pictures all by Ho Chung in the Luis de Camoes Museum in Macau. Among them, a circular fan painting has been inscribed by the artist with the date Keng-tze ✯; a year corresponding to the 26th year in the Kwang-shü * era during the Ch'ing Dynasty, which in turn corresponds to the year 1900. This is a very helpful discovery, since if Ho Chung died around 1900 at the age of seventy-five, he might have been born around 1825. At any rate, Ho Chung must have been an artist chiefly active in the second half of the 19th century and presumably his late years touched at least the first one or two years of the 20th century.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, Chinese painting in Kwangtung certainly developed into a more fruitful stage than in the preceding centuries. Nevertheless, the artistic quality of these Kwangtung paintings was not only less significant than those of the Chiang-nan area, the centre of Chinese painting of that time
- but also can hardly be compared with the standard of her neighbouring province, Fukien. For this reason, within these three centuries, artists who were not natives of Kwangtung and were also not first class artists of the Chiang-nan area, but whenever and wherever settled in Kwangtung, were always regarded by Kwangtung art historians as Kwangtung artists. For instance, Wang Hou-lai, a native of An-hui province settled at Pan-yü during the 18th century, was treated as a representative artist for Kwangtung landscape painting. Similarly, Sung Kwang-pao and Meng Chin-i, two artists of the Kiangsu province, lived in Kwang-