NOTES AND QUERIES
289
China, like Taiwan and Japan, the quality of contemporary Kwang-tung painting was still something admirable.
Last but not least, some observations on Ho Chung's works have to be made. In general, this Nan-hai artist had two favoured subjects: figures with simple landscape settings, and birds-and-flowers. For the former, he liked to place some figures - usually no more than two - encountered on a river bank or walking along the mountain road - on the foreground. Then he would put several trees associated with different foliage into the top of the composition slantingly entering from one side of the picture. The hanging branches of the trees together with the line denoting the ground plane would, when linked with the position of the foreground figures, form an imaginary circle, which in turn provided the spectacular area of the whole painting.
As to birds-and-flowers, Ho Chung's pictures were usually designed with the trunk of either a tree or a bamboo diagonally extending itself from the centre of one side of the composition quite near its top, while a short branch would diagonally cross the entire picture space from the same side to the other. Beneath the chief trunk and the shorter branch, there were usually some flowers. Such a subject could sometimes be varied into ducks or mandarin ducks among reeds whenever the artist liked the bottom space to be water rather than solid ground. Needless to say, on the upper part of the same picture, birds were commonly depicted as perched on tree branches.
In short, Ho Chung's paintings, formulated by the above principles, due to their compositional simplicity, please the eyes of his admirers. In addition, his explicit application of light colours is another important factor by which Ho Chung's works can be equally accepted by scholars as well as art lovers of any class of Chinese society. Furthermore, from a stylistic viewpoint, although such simplicity and explicitness are primarily derived from Hua Yen (1682-1755, still alive), an 18th-century artist from Fukien, in Ho Chung's painting, the new element which exemplified the general country life of Kwangtung should certainly be regarded as an individuality of his own.
To sum up, during the late 19th century, the popularity of Ho Chung's painting must be connected with the following factors: in the first place, his localized subject-matter, which looked so familiar to all local lovers of his art; secondly, the duration of his artistic