In this set of four hanging scrolls, Wu Dacheng 吳大澂 (1835–1902) copied the entire text of the Inscription on the San Family basin散氏盤銘文for a friend who, as Wu notes on the fourth scroll, requested from him this specific text in a set of four hanging scrolls. Wu executes the strokes of each character with great care. Rather than beginning and ending a stroke with sharp points, as are many great-seal characters in bronze inscriptions often executed, here the calligrapher softens almost every stroke by rounding off its ends and edges. As a result, the characters are steady and balanced. The steadiness and balance of each individual character are certainly Wu’s deliberate design. Just as Shen C.Y. Fu has pointed out, Wu “preferred a tighter structure, emphasizing stability. His brush moves in a solemn, steady manner—simple strength emanating inner power.”Shen C.Y. Fu, Traces of the Brush: Studies in Chinese Calligraphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977): 54. Even the overall structure of the four scrolls enhances the work’s balance. Each scroll has five vertical columns and each column has twenty characters. The calligrapher made sure that in each scroll the characters across the columns are aligned, and when the scrolls are hung side by side, the characters and columns create a uniform set of four scrolls.

Wu also studied, and in his calligraphy drew on, both great-seal script and small-seal script; therefore his transcriptions of bronze inscriptions did not copy the alignment and composition of the ancient texts.Wu Yonglai 吳勇來, “Wu Dacheng de jinshi yanjiu yu zhuanshu” 吳大澂的金石研究與篆書. Shuhua yishu 書畫藝術 5 (2007): 41.

In the case of the San Family basin, a ritual bronze dated to the late Western Zhou dynasty (ca. 9th-8th centuries b.c.) and excavated in the second half of the 17th century, the inscription contains 357 words in 19 columns cast on its interior, and this inscription has been an influential model for great-seal-script calligraphy.An important historical document about the Western Zhou, the content of the inscription concerns the outcome and consequence of an armed conflict between two states, the State of Ce and the State of San, both located in the area that is part of the Province of Shanxi in today’s northwest China. Defeated during its invasion into the San State, the Ce State agreed to cede some territory as its indemnity for San. The document narrates the meeting between fifteen Ce officials and ten San officials under the supervision of emissaries sent by the King Li of Zhou (Reign 857-841 BEC). The inscription also records in some details the treaty signed, particularly the whereabouts of the newly-established borderlines between the two states. For transcription of the San’s text, see Guo Moruo郭沫若, Liang Zhou jinwen daxi tulu kaoshi 兩周金文辭大系圖錄考釋 (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1957), 129-131. For the Qing study of the inscriptions of the bronzewares including the San’s Basin, see Edward L. Shaughnessy, Sources of Western Zhou History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991): 5-34. Wu Dacheng studied this work with vigor and enthusiasm,“寫金文為開山鼻祖.” Ding Foyan 丁佛言, “Introduction” to his Shuowen guzhou bubu 說文古籀補補 (China: n.p., 1924): 5a. but he did not simply copy the bronze inscription. It is common knowledge that most of the characters on the basin do not stand straight, but rather lean slightly to the left or to the right. Wu aligns the characters in an orderly fashion and executes the characters in neat, even strokes. The balance which he introduces to great-seal script here and elsewhere has not always been appreciated: Wu was criticized by some calligraphers.The modern critic Zonghuo 馬宗霍 denies completely, also quite unfairly, the aesthetic and calligraphic value of Wu’s works owing to his neat and balanced scripts (其篆書整齊如算子，絕不足觀). Ma, Shulin zaojian, Shulin jishi 書林藻鑒, 書林記事 (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1984): 237. On the whole, however, many consider Wu to be an outstanding calligrapher of significant accomplishment.See the comments by Pan Zuyin 潘祖荫, a friend of Wu, in Gu Tinglong 顧廷龍, comp., Wu Kezhai xiansheng nianpu 吳愙齋先生年譜 (Beijing: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1936), 63, 65; and Wang Qiangang 王潛剛, Qingren shupin 清人書評 in Cui Erping 崔爾平, ed., Lidai shufa lunwen xue xubian 歷代書法論文選續編 (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhuashe, 1993): 128. For the encompassing praises of Wu’s calligraphy from Xie Guozhen 謝國楨, a modern historian, in Xie Guozhen, ed., Wu Kezhai chidu 吳愙齋尺牘 (Taibei: Taibei wenhai chuban youxian gongsi, 1971): 431.

Wu Dacheng’s excellence in calligraphy is in part a result of his deep knowledge of epigraphy and archaeology. Of his many contributions, his Shuowen guzhou bu 說文古籀補 (1883) not only offers students of calligraphy abundant examples of great-seal script gathered from inscriptions on bronze vessels and implements such as seals, bells, weights and measures, but also develops and expands in a significant fashion Chinese paleography. For almost two thousand years, the Chinese were told, in the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 by Xu Shen 許慎 (ca. 58–ca. 147), that the oldest writing system in China was called guwen 古文, or ancient script. Based on his research, however, Wu Dacheng pointed out that the guwen system mentioned by Xu was used during the Warring States period (770 b.c.–256 b.c.), whereas the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou (1066 b.c.–771 b.c.) offer a script older than guwen—the system of zhou 籀 or great-seal. Wu’s work, which Gu Jiegang顧頡剛 has called “epoch-making,”Gu, Dangdai Zhongguo shixue 當代中國史學 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002): 27. is commonly accepted today.

By re-writing the inscription of San’s basin, Wu contributes to the popularization of the study of bronzes and their script type.

© 2013 by the Seattle Art Museum