Tradition…cannot be inherited,
and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.T. S. Eliot. “Tradition and Individual Talent” in The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), p. 28.

Introduction

In the fall of 1762, Xiang Jun項均 (active 2nd half 18th c.) and Luo Ping羅聘 (1733–1799) spent two months in Hangzhou, three days of travel from their native Yangzhou. Invited by their mentor Jin Nong金農 (1687–1763) to undertake a “grand tour” that marked the pinnacle of their five-year-long collaboration, the pupils visited Hangzhou’s many ancient vestiges and reveled in the scenery of the West Lake, for centuries a favored destination of painters and poets. Hangzhou was also Jin Nong’s hometown and the place that had nurtured the artist’s initial forays into the arts. As dizi弟子 (pupils) of Jin Nong, one of the empire’s leading intellectual figures, Xiang and Luo gained access to Hangzhou’s exclusive scholarly circles, legendary art collections and libraries. Within a few weeks, they produced a number of paintings and poems that are testament to the seminal importance that this experience had on their formative years.Beside the Seattle Album and the Portrait of Mr. Ding Jingsheng [Ding Jing] discussed below, other paintings that date to this period include Luo Ping’s Copy of Three Horse Paintings by Members of the Zhao Family (Beijing: Palace Museum), and Portrait of Chan Master Tan (Suzhou: Suzhou Museum). The poem “Xihu za shi er shi er shou西湖雜詩二十二首” [Twenty-two Poems on the West Lake] included in Luo Ping’s collection/anthology is also datable to this period. A later reflection of Luo’s experience in Hangzhou occupies his late masterpiece The Sleeping Monk from 1791 (New York: C.C. Wang Family Collection).

With five leaves signed by Luo Ping and five by Xiang Jun, Landscape, Human Figures, and Flowers, the album in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, stands as the most exhaustive pictorial corollary to this moment of study, discovery, and experimentalism. Nothing is known of the circumstances of its creation. The album’s superb qualities suggest that it may have been conceived for one of Hangzhou’s leading patrons, possibly the former minister and art patron Liang Shizheng梁詩正 (1697–1763). In 1796, Liang’s son, the prominent calligrapher Liang Tongshu梁同書 (1723–1815) inscribed the album’s title. Nothing else is known about its provenance before the modern era when the collector Wang Shiyuan汪士元 (1877–1921) added his seals and a second label.Wang Shiyuan汪士元’s extensive painting catalog Luyun lou shuhua ji lue麓雲樓書畫記略 (1922) does not include mention of the album.

Over the last two decades, the album’s inventive iconography, wide range of art-historical and literary references, and sensitive application of classical modes of elegant expression have generated significant scholarly interest. As the only surviving example of joint authorship—rather than collaboration in the strictest sense of the word by Luo and Xiang, two of Jin’s best-known pupils—the album has joined letters, poems, and other paintings as evidence of the interweaving of personal, professional, and artistic exchanges that characterized the experience of Jin Nong’s studio. It forged the pupils’ artistic profile, as much as coloring Jin’s public persona. The ways in which Luo Ping and Xiang Jun evoke and reinvent Jin Nong’s visual universe have clear “self-attributing” implications, that cast light on the extent of the pupils’ responsibilities as “ghost painters” for Jin Nong.

“Self-attributing” as it is, the album therefore provides one of the rare occasions for reconsidering also how the students related and responded to the legacy of their mentor, and the role that they ascribed to him in the process of their artistic training. In the critical literati tradition that had since its inception enshrined innovation over invention, and the formation of stylistic lineages throughout the centuries, discourses about the skills and craft of painting had been deemed as most appropriate to the conditions of production of the professional’s workshop rather than to the more rarified atmosphere of the scholar’s studio. So little pictorial evidence survives of the artists’ early years that it has become almost impossible to glimpse beneath prescriptive formulas on authenticity and originality. Luo Ping’s and Xiang Jun’s diligent—and in their oeuvre hitherto unprecedented—display of knowledge about the history of painting suggests that the process of discovery was as important as the end product. These exercises were comparable to debates on talent and training, and spontaneity and erudition that animated contemporary poetry circles, in particular the one around Jin Nong.

For Luo Ping and Xiang Jun, these intellectual ambitions coincided with more personal ones. The exploration of the two artists’ craft could not but intersect with their experience under Jin Nong, which served for both artists as the foundation in their social and artistic lives which had just begun to unfold. In the album’s interrelated pictorial references, Jin Nong is granted a central role, and in some of its most celebrated passages, the two artists’ voices echo that of their mentor. A desire to be identified in relation to—rather than in opposition to— the legacy of their mentor seems at play.

Virtually nothing is known of Xiang Jun, but Luo Ping repeatedly returned to his early affiliation with Jin Nong. Throughout his career, Luo’s identity as “pupil” of Jin Nong took many forms, and affected his contemporaries’ reception of his work.For long- and even today- people took Luo Ping exclusively as the pupil of Jin Nong, and much of his success was determined by his early association to Jin. Manifesting that bond through the creation of a language of formal identity poetically reconfigured the act of painting as the expression of filial devotion, a protocol of self-definition equally predicated upon identification and repetition. In one of the few studies dedicated to the subject, Chou Ju-hsi has perceptively explored the multiple dimensions that the master-pupil relation could inhabit, and one has to go back to the album that Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470–1559) completed for his mentor Shen Zhou 沈周 (1427–1509) around 1497 to find an equally powerful statement about the interweaving of personal and social meanings behind that bond.Chou Ju-hsi. “Through the Disciples’ Eye: Transmission and Group Interaction in the Ming and Qing Periods” in Chou Ju-hsi and Claudia Brown, eds. Heritage of the Brush: The Roy and Marilyn Papp Collection of Chinese Painting (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1989), pp. 11-23. The album is in the collection of Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri (46-51 A-F). For a reproduction Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980), pp. 185-187 Affirmative rather than defective, and empowering rather than self-constricting, establishing one’s voice as “pupil” became the medium for an inter-generational (master-pupil) and infra-generational (pupil-pupil) communication that foregrounded likeness as the by-product of shared experiences and sense of kinship. After all, dizi was an appellation as much as it was a condition one could strive for and willfully seek to inscribe on oneself; and from which to look and be looked at in the world.

Present: Hangzhou and its Scholarly Circles

The Liang family played an active role as sponsor of Hangzhou’s literary and artistic demimonde. Their residence was a must-see destination for local talents and out-of-town visitors, including the Qianlong Emperor who stayed there in 1762. Important literary figures like Li E厲鶚 (1692–1752), Hang Shijun杭世駿 (1696–1773) and Ding Jing丁敬 (1695–1795) were members of this coterie and close friends of Jin Nong. A small but committed cluster of bibliophiles and collectors like Wang Xian汪憲 (1721–1770) and Lu Wenchao盧文弨 (1717–1795) provided local talents with temporary employment, ensuring they could pursue their research. “Bonds of letters” among likeminded individuals celebrated coinciding aesthetic sensibilities, with a slight disdain for the petty matters of official administration and the examinations. The founding of the Nanping Poetry Society 南屏詩社 sanctioned the activities of this network of formal and informal bonds and set the tone of Hangzhou’s social life.On Eighteenth-century Hangzhou literary culture, see Nancy Lee Swann. “Seven Intimate Library Owners” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 1 (1936), pp. 363-390; and Lau Chak Kwong. “Ding Jing (1695-1765) and the Founding of the Xiling Identity in Hangzhou” Ph.D. diss, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006

Luo Ping and Xiang Jun were attuned to urban culture, as they had been nurtured in the equally sophisticated circles of Yangzhou. Hangzhou and Yangzhou had long enjoyed close ties, and those had become stronger by mid-century. Yangzhou patrons began to sponsor Hangzhou scholars, and many relocated to the Yangzhou area north of the Yangzi River. Jin Nong had responded to the opportunities that Yangzhou’s ambitious and perceptive elite had to offer, as so had his friend Ding Jing, albeit less successfully. A colorful personality with a mercurial temperament, quick wit, and aversion to social norms as deep only as his erudition, Ding became Luo’s and Xiang’s main interlocutor during his Hangzhou days.

Ding Jing took an immediate liking to Luo Ping. From his humble abode outside the city, Ding monitored an extended network of followers and students, including Liang Tongshu, involved in his monumental epigraphic compilations. By the time of Luo’s visit, Ding had established himself as leading authority in calligraphy, poetry, and seal-carving, all interests he had shared with Jin Nong, and now with his students. Luo Ping studied Ding’s art collection, and the two exchanged numerous gifts. One is Luo’s early masterpiece, a portrait of Ding as the iconic recluse, sitting on a rock, his bird-like neck stretching disproportionately from a skeletal body.The Portrait of Mr. Dongxin by Luo Ping is housed in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum (21242) and reproduced in Kim Karlsson, Alfreda Murck, and Michele Matteini eds. Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799) (Zurich: Rietberg Museum, 2009), cat. no. 13, pp. 166-167. Ding wrote two poems in honor of Luo Ping as a large calligraphy, now mounted next to the painting. Ding praises Luo Ping’s talents in capturing his Buddha-body, and entrusts the portrait to the artist for the benefit of future generations; he also carved six seals for him. Luo kept the painting and seals in his possession throughout his life.

The activities of Hangzhou poetry friends followed a regular schedule of events that took place in the city’s famous scenic sites, temples, and private gardens. Under the tutelage of a patron, gatherings extended over several hours, and usually combined poetry competitions with art appreciation, accompanied by music and wine. Popular poetic games included the impromptu creation of poems after ancient models or more challenging collaborations among different participants. On some occasions, the outcomes of the gathering were published in anthologies that manifested the social significance that literary pursuits held among eighteenth-century elite.

Consummate simplicity and calculated informality similarly inflect Luo Ping’s and Xiang Jun’s pictorial performance, as though the two were looking anew at well-rehearsed scripts for an audience conversant with classical culture. Confident in the handling of the small format and its compositional constraints, Luo and Xiang weave together diverse, independent compositions that, much like an improvised sequence of matching lines, gains significance in the totality of related references, and in anticipation of what was still to come. The artists test the versatility of their brush against different sources of inspiration, ancient and contemporary.

On Leaf Eight, Xiang Jun revisits the flower composition most frequently associated with the older generation of Yangzhou-based artists. The silhouette of a single branch of rose that appears from the slow application of ink tones against sparks of brilliant pink exhibits Xiang’s mastery of the “boneless” method of Yun Shouping惲壽平(1633–1690), as canonized among his late eighteenth-century followers, particularly by Chen Zhuan陳撰 (1678–1758), another Hangzhou native in Yangzhou.

The agile distribution of dangling grapes across the upper portion of Leaf Six is a virtuoso expression in monochrome ink reminiscent of the “ink plays” of Xu Wei徐渭 (1521–1593) and early “splashed ink” experiments, a reference that the inscription, drawn from Jin Nong’s repertoire, also conjures up.

The landscapes pose more complex compositional questions for the artists. In Leaf Two Luo Ping sets the tone with a close-up view of a group of scholars at leisure. The combination of sensitively drawn minute description and abbreviated transitions in pale washes are steeped in the spirited mood of Hua Yan華嵒 (1682–1756), and would become one of Luo’s stylistic trademarks.

By contrast, Xiang Jun conceives of one of the album’s most striking images in Leaf Seven. Here Xiang depicts a lonely scholar gazing toward the horizon from an elevated hill, taking as his point of departure Shitao石濤 (1642–1707), who was for many artists the patriarch of Yangzhou painting. The evocation of Yangzhou’s early splendors extends into the accompanying text, a transcription of a poem by Wang Shizhen王士禎 (1634–1711), the towering literatus whose name was intimately entwined with Yangzhou’s post-conquest resurgence.

Leaves Four and Nine set a different tempo altogether. Again, the two artists seem to be working in tandem although Chinese viewers of their time would have viewed the album one leaf at a time, similar to a book. In Leaf Four Luo’s landscape in brilliant color stands against the cooling effect of Xiang Jun’s stark monochrome ink in Leaf Nine. Depictions of arduous mountain passes based on Song paintings are transformed into a lively vignette of the pleasures of travel and sociability, indebted to the model of the late Wu school. In Leaf Nine Xiang Jun uses a dry-linear manner, favored by early Qing painters, to depict an uninhabited landscape, matched by an inscription which is a Buddhist reflection on impermanence.

Amidst all this stands Luo Ping’s celebrated monochrome outline of two Western figures in Leaf Three. While possible sources for the figures have been identified, their meaning remains elusive.For an interpretation on this leaf, see Richard Barnhart, et al. The Jade Studio: Masterpieces of Ming and Qing Painting and Calligraphy from the Wong Nan-p’ing Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 239.

Such an intricate web of interrelated pictorial and literary associations, all highly original, demonstrates how the artists sought to confidently express their individual artistic personalities through distinctive stylistic references. For example, Xiang Jun’s rendering of the cut flower reveals a certain leaning toward the anti-naturalistic that suggests the desired aesthetic qualities of “stiffness” (shengying 生硬) and “awkwardness” (se 澀) that Hangzhou poets pursued in their writing and research. For them, poetry ought to combine expression with erudition through a meticulously crafted language of artifice. That set Hangzhou poets apart from the emphasis on intuition and spontaneity that Yangzhou poets had learned from Wang Shizhen, and is best exemplified by the work of Li Shan李鱓 (1688-ca. 1757).On the development and theoretical positions of Zhe school of poetry, see Zhang Zhongmo張仲謀. Qingdai wenhua yu Zhe pai shi清代文化與浙派詩 [Qing Dynasty Culture and Zhe School Poetry] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1997). For a discussion on the relationship between erudition and poetic expression and the aesthetic principles of Zhe school of poetry, see Zhang Jian張健. Qingdai shi xue yanjiu清代詩學研究 [Research on the study of Poetry during the Qing Dynasty] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1999), pp. 605 ff.

None of Hangzhou’s leading poets had sought to apply this approach to painting, except Jin Nong, who had introduced it to Yangzhou. Away from their mentor Jin Nong and before an audience familiar with his experimentations, Xiang Jun and Luo Ping attested to the fact that transmission had been accomplished.

Past: Yangzhou and the Experience of Jin Nong’s Studio

By the time Luo Ping and Xiang Jun completed the album, their affiliation to Jin Nong was coming to an end as Jin Nong died soon after their return to Yangzhou in late 1763–early 1764. To document their successes in Hangzhou, Luo Ping dutifully brought Ding Jing’s portrait back, where it rejoined Jin Nong, whose health was failing.

Having achieved an empire-wide fame as antiquarian, calligrapher, and flamboyant bon vivant, Jin Nong had relocated to Yangzhou in the 1740s. During the following two decades, he devoted his time to training young talents and broadening the scope of his artistic practice, developing a more consistent dedication to painting. In less than fifteen years, Jin adapted his skills as calligrapher to the depiction of bamboo and plum blossoms, before moving into the more pictorially-challenging genres of horses, landscapes, and eventually Buddhist figures.

Thirty-something years his junior, Luo Ping was the offspring of those circles of ambitious urbanites that Jin had come to entertain, and with whom he had made a name for himself as a precocious, talented poet. Around 1756, Luo Ping was formally accepted in the coterie of Jin’s students, followed two years later by Xiang Jun.The chronology is unclear. I rely here on Wang Luyu王魯豫. Yangzhou baguai nianpu揚州八怪年譜 [Chronology of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou] (Nanjing: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 1996). From poetry, they swiftly moved to painting.

While Luo Ping was destined to have a long and successful career, Xiang Jun remains an elusive personality—this album being the only secure attribution. For Jin, theirs was “a destined affinity of painting and poetry” that manifested itself in opposite, but complementary manners. “Luo had reached the breadth of my seven-character verses,Jin Nong. Dongxin xiansheng hua mei tiji冬心先生畫梅題紀 [Collection of Inscriptions on Plum Blossom Paintings by Jin Nong], repr. In Zhang Yuming张郁明, et al. Yangzhou baguai shiwen ji: Jin Nong wenji; Luo Ping shiwenji揚州八怪詩文集:金農文集,羅聘詩文集 [Collection of Poems and Prose by the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou: Luo Ping and Jin Nong] (Nanjing: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 1996), p. 168 and Xiang the evocative depth of my five-character verses.” Xiang excelled in plum painting, and was a model for Luo, who included a long poem in praise of him in his poetry collection, published later in life.Luo Ping. “Xiang Gong fu hua mei ge項貢父畫梅歌” [Xiang Gongfu [Xiang Jun] Painting Plum Blossoms] in Xiangye caotang shicun香葉草堂詩存 [Preserved Poetry from the Thatched Hut of Fragrant Leaves], repr. In ibid. p. 297

Painting and the study of its histories became increasingly central to Jin’s activities, between the late 1750s and early 1760s. At this time the studio produced some of its most ambitious projects, and the role that the pupils played as “ghost painters” for pictures that Jin would eventually inscribe has been explored.For more information on Jin Nong and his ‘substitute brushes,’ see Wu Erlu吳爾鹿. “Jin Nong he tade daibi hua” 金農和他的代筆 [Jin Nong and His Substitute Brushes] Wenwu, vol. 12 (1988), pp. 69-78. Jin Nong’s late albums, however, are not just duplicates, but are evidence of reworking familiar compositions that were taking place in the close interaction between master and students.

Hierarchies within Jin’s studio were far from fixed, but constantly renegotiated according to a model of cooperative labor that was different from the organization of a standard painting workshop.The connoisseurial aspects of Jin Nong’s late production and the interventions of Luo Ping and other assistants are explored among others in Mu Yiqin穆益勤. “Jin Nong de huihua yu Luo Ping de daibi金農的繪畫與羅聘的代筆” [Jin Nong’s Paintings and Luo Ping’s ‘Substitute Brush’] Mingbao yuekan明報月刊 vol. 20, no. 1 (1985), pp. 56-58. Their conceptual implications and consequences for self-definitions are explored in Richard Vinograd’s essay “Afterlives: Image and Identity between Jin Nong and Luo Ping” in Eccentric Visions: The World of Luo Ping, pp. 30-37 Letters, inscriptions, as well as rather piquant remarks by contemporary observers, in addition show that these practices were well-known, and surely played a role in the success of the younger artists destined to attract the attention of a small audience of experienced connoisseurs, who must have been entertained by the play of different hands painting under the signature of Jin Nong.

From about 1759, Luo Ping had also established his own painting studio. The wide array of pictures he produced, from formal portraits to flower-compositions, only intermittently capitalized upon Luo’s bond to Jin Nong, looking instead to the variegated artistic landscape of mid-century Yangzhou.I am here thinking about Luo Ping’s little-known portrait entitled Watching the Waterfall, dated 1763, in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (75.95), reproduced in Eight Dynasties, cat. no. 271. Other paintings, in particular albums of flowers and plants, engage more explicitly with Jin Nong. There was therefore an essentially performative dimension to Luo Ping’s identity as dizi, which the artist willfully embraced or could discard for the creation of “genuine” pictures that, while displaying Luo’s “authentic” touch, indirectly provided hints to the decoding of his own identity under the guise of Jin Nong.

Two leaves in the Seattle album reflect Luo and Xiang's experience in Jin’s studio. In Leaf Five by Luo Ping, the lush bamboo grove in crisp, two-tone ink stands next to a poem redolent with sensory references to its secret beauty. The poem was composed by Jin Nong. The same poem appears on another bamboo painting from that year signed by Jin Nong. The soft handling creates broad, modulated brushstrokes, suggesting that this painting may well be an example of Luo’s undisclosed hand.Jin Nong. Bamboos. 1762. Measures unknown. Lanqian shanguan Collection. Published in Li Chu-tsing. “The Bamboo Paintings of Jin Nong” Archives of Asian Art, vol. 27 (1973/1974), p. 66, fig. 19. Both inscriptions compare the beauty of the plant to those by the Guoxi Pavilion, a famous site significantly in Hangzhou praised in a well-known poem by Su Shi.

Likewise, Xiang Jun’s terse sprawl of plum blossoms on Leaf Ten shows the artist’s unique approach to flowering plum, a standard product of Jin Nong’s studio. Xiang’s crisp delineation is different from Luo’s characteristic sinuous lines, but remarkably close to the graphic qualities of many albums carrying Jin Nong’s signature. A few years before, Jin acknowledged that even the most experienced connoisseur would have trouble distinguishing between Xiang’s hand and his own.

Becoming dizi

Through the years, Jin Nong became exceedingly aware of his responsibilities as mentor, and the challenges his students had to face. For their part, the pupils celebrated their mentor in charged words that strike the reader still today. On one occasion, Luo Ping likened Jin Nong to a woodblock used for printing sutras, endlessly multiplying his aura.Luo Ping. “Dongxin xiansheng hua fo ge冬心先生畫佛歌 [Ballad on Mr. Dongxin [Jin Nong] Painting Buddhist Images]” in Xiangye caotang shicun, p. 290 Shared commitment to the Buddhist Law further strengthened the meaning the men ascribed to their bond, and became the prism for more pictorial and poetic reflections on identity, role, and persona. At the end of life, Jin presented the students with his self-portraits which they would have after his passing, prolonging, like amulets, his beneficial protection.

Here another of the Seattle album’s leaves, Leaf One, is relevant. The pensive ascetic of Leaf One relates to an equally somber rendering in a 1759 album—now in the Palace Museum, Beijing—of miscellaneous subjects, the product of Jin Nong at the height of his collaboration with Luo and Xiang (fig. 1). Coupled by Jin Nong’s visually prominent transcription of his Buddhist name, the picture is testament to Jin’s religious zeal late in life. Luo Ping returns to this image, and limits his intervention to a few lively ink strokes that animate the man’s facial features.Leaf 8 in Album of Figures and Landscapes, 1759, album of twelve leaves, ink and color on paper, each leaf 24.3 x 30.7 cm, Beijing: Palace Museum Most poignantly, Luo eliminates Jin Nong’s landscape setting to isolate the figure against a blocky transcription of the Heart Sutra, signed as Luo Ping’s Buddhist identity, the “Monk of the Temple of Flowers.” Such presentation revives some of Jin Nong’s most daring compositional innovations. Like an icon, Luo Ping’s act of re-painting invests the image with new efficacy. Luo Ping becomes “Jin Nong” at the same time the two men’s historical experiences are superseded by the spiritual entities they sought one day to become. Master and pupils’ roles are again fused as both were students of the Buddhist law.

Fig. 1: Jin Nong, Leaf 8 in Album of Figures and Landscapes, 1759. Collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing.

This introduces an element of circularity and reciprocity in the ways the pupils envisioned themselves and their relationship with their mentor. Learning was a process that unfolded over time, and each time it was guided by the encounter with new sources, as the multiple scripts that the pupils perform in the Seattle album so aptly reveal. Their progress was repeatedly measured against the model of their mentor as a way to acknowledge his role in their formation as artists. Through analogies, the pupils explored the possibilities of painting to establish and manifest that bond. Far from mere marketing strategies or artistic derivation, this process had self-defining implications, as it allowed the artists to inscribe themselves into a socially-sanctioned role. But rather than defective and self-negating, becoming a “pupil” meant preparing oneself to be a mentor in the future.

In constructing an artistic profile that was responsive to the world around them, Luo Ping and Xiang Jun claimed citizenship in a community with shared experiences and aspirations. By so doing, they are reminiscent of the talented women of the Zhang family, who, as perceptively observed by Susan Mann, strove to modulate their poetic voices to echo those of their ancestors, as means to draw nearer to them and overcome/transcend the separation of time.Susan Mann. The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

To these eighteenth-century women and men, socially sanctioned modes of expression left room for negotiating their own personal and emotional concerns. These affective communities, as Maram Epstein has recently proposed, provided ground for the creation of new social networks.Maram Epstein. “Writing Emotions: Ritual Innovation as Emotional Expression” Nan Nü, vol. 11 (2009), pp. 155-196

Luo Ping returned to Hangzhou one more time. In 1765, he accompanied Jin’s remains and, as filial son, performed all rituals. In the following years, he devoted himself to the compilation and publication of Jin’s poetry. In 1771, his decision to leave Yangzhou led him to Beijing where he spent most of his late life. At the gathering that marked his official presentation to Beijing’s scholarly circles, Jin’s old friend famously exclaimed, “Looking at Liangfeng [Luo Ping] is just like seeing Jin Nong come back to life.” That identification having been acknowledged, Luo Ping’s voice as dizi could be silenced.

© 2013 by the Seattle Art Museum