Chinese calligraphy : an introduction to its aesthetic and technique : with 6 plates and 155 text illustratons

OTHER FORMS OF CHINESE ART

early training must have so familiarized them with the shapes and patterns of writing that these patterns emerged in their sculptured or engraved designs.

There is a great variety of design in early Ghinese pottery. An almost sophisticated individuality seems sometimes to have Possessed its creators, to which they sacrificed even regularity and utility. I give below seven different forms of the character Hu, ‘ pot’, in the ancient script.

rego 8 &

FIG. 142—HU, POT

A comparison of these with those real pots which one might have seen in the Chinese Exhibition in London or in some big museum leaves no doubt in the mind that the two were contemporaneous. The earliest inventors of handwriting modelled their characters upon actual objects, but I am not at all sure that the earliest pot-makers did not find some of their patterns among the already beautified forms of characters. At any rate the characters had some effect on the pots.

You have probably noticed that the animal forms carved upon stone, jade and bronze are far from realistic, but possibly you have not noticed how closely the principles of simplification employed by the artists correspond with those practised by the precedent calligraphers who invented the characters for the same animals. The examples in Plate VI show the resemblance clearly.

I could easily multiply examples to prove the i impression I have had for a long time that almost all Chinese carving followed

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