Nanpin school

Pine, Plum and Cranes, 1759. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk. The Palace Museum, Beijing by Shen Quan.

Nanpinha (南蘋派, "Nanping or Nanpin or Nampin school"), was a school of painting which flourished in Nagasaki during the Edo period. Chinese painter Shen Nanping or Shen Quan (simplified Chinese: 沈铨; traditional Chinese: 沈銓; pinyin: Shěn Quán; Wade–Giles: Shen Ch'üan; c. 1682–1760) was an artist who painted in Ming academic style.

He arrived in Nagasaki on the 37th ship on December 3, 1731, and left Japan two years later, on September 18, 1733.^[1]

Shen Nanping was specialised in bird-and-flower painting (Ch: huaniao hua, J: kachōga), one of the major artistic subjects, especially among professional Chinese painters.

The painting style of Shen Nanping and his school would therefore be fruit of an artistic investigation. In their paintings, flora and fauna are not just “realistic”, but are styled just as they appear in Chinese and European treatises.

The commercial activity in the port of Nagasaki facilitated the spread of Western knowledge in Japan. Japanese people were particularly interested in the millenarian Chinese culture.

In the 18th century, Japanese people became very interested in Western natural sciences, even if that did not mean a break from Chinese tradition. Chinese and Western treatises on natural sciences could have played a key role in the spread of knowledge on subjects such as botany, zoology, and mineralogy, and that the images featured in these treatises might have inspired artists to choose and create new representations of bird-and-flower. That is why scholar Meccarelli has called the style of the Nanpin school “flora and fauna decorative painting”.^[2] In the Nanping painting school, the decorative aspect was even more emphasised, because paintings had to satisfy the taste of merchants.^[3]

Nanpinha Artists of Note

• Kumashiro Yūhi (1712-1772)
• Zheng Pei (fl. mid-18th century)
• Sō Shiseki (1715-1786)

References