New Year Offerings

The custom of displaying such springtide paintings to observe the Chinese New Year dates back to the Song dynasty. By the Yuan and Ming periods, the message to be conveyed shifted from aversion of evils to invocation for blessings and hence the motifs of auspicious flowers and objects as well as festivities of the season. In the late Ming, literati began adorning their homes with flowers at the turn of the lunar year and the practice was transposed to paintings that usually feature seasonal plants such as narcissus, sacred bamboo, pine, and plum blossom in bronze or ceramic vases. Other offerings included citrons, persimmons and ruyi-scepters for their connotations of auspiciousness, wealth and happiness. In the late Qing, these paintings also took the form of flowers added to composite rubbings of antique bronzes, testifying to the current enthusiasm for epigraphy in the literati circles.

Dispensing with the expected overtones of elegance or opulence, the present specimen is no doubt a nonconformist. Despite the selection of Chinese New Year plants like the plum blossom, pine, sacred bamboo and pomegranate, desolation fills the painting with its rustic basket for a makeshift vase behind a teapot on charcoal. Dated the 1st year of the Qianlong reign (1736), it visualizes the misery that must have been gripping the painter just before he resolved to try rejoining the civil service a few months later.

Li Shan, a native of Xinghua, Jiangsu province, ranks with other masters as the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou”. Through his depiction of genre scenes in many other paintings of New Year offerings, Li Shan exerted far-reaching influences on the development of the future Shanghai School of painting.