Selling Drinks (賣漿圖) by the Qing dynasty painter Yao Wenhan is a celebrated Qianlong-era copy of an older painting, now held by the National Palace Museum. Its composition balances dense and open passages, its figures are finely drawn, and it brings the life of the marketplace and the customs of the people vividly into view. Do you know what kind of “drink” the peddler in this work is selling?
In ancient times, “selling drinks” referred mainly to selling beverages. The kinds were many, and included wine, tea, congee, and fruit juices. This painting recreates the “tea contest” (鬥茶, known in the Tang dynasty as 茗戰), a competition in which tea lovers brought out the leaves they treasured at home and judged one another’s tea for its relative merits. It began in the Tang dynasty and flourished under the Song.
The ‘selling drinks’ subject, recombined again and again into new forms
Liu Songnian (about 1150 to after 1225) styled himself Qingbo and was a native of Qiantang (present-day Hangzhou, Zhejiang) in the Southern Song. He excelled at figures and landscapes, his brush and ink were exquisite, and the figures he painted had crisp, vigorous lines and living expressions. He is counted among the “Four Masters of the Southern Song.”
The earliest source for the imagery of Yao Wenhan’s Selling Drinks can be traced to Liu Songnian’s Wagering at the Tea Market (茗園賭市). Painters of later dynasties continually recombined and pieced together this kind of subject, creating new forms from it.
At the 2021 special exhibition “Hidden Gems: Masterpieces from the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art Collection,” the National Palace Museum showed Yao Wenhan’s Selling Drinks side by side with a Tea Contest (鬥茶圖) attributed to the Yuan dynasty painter Qian Xuan, on loan from the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art; parts of the two compositions are largely the same. A Selling Drinks is also attributed to the Song painter Su Hanchen, and the Yuan painter Zhao Mengfu left a well-known Tea Contest of his own.
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Yao Wenhan’s Selling Drinks depicts a street tea stall and a tea contest
Yao Wenhan (active about 1736 to 1795), styled Zhuoting, served in the inner court painting academy during the Qianlong reign. He was skilled at Daoist and Buddhist figures, landscapes, ruled-line architectural painting and more. His brushwork was fine and assured, his coloring clear and refined, and within the Qing academy he belonged to the school that looked back to tradition.
Selling Drinks, in ink and color on paper, shows street vendors selling tea and a tea contest in progress. Men and women, young and old, ten in all, have gathered, and the scene is full of life.
In the upper left is a long-bearded tea peddler, his face deeply lined, who has set his double load down on the ground. The carrying frames hold a dazzling array of bowls, chopsticks, pots, jars, a stove and more. In front of him, a woman with delicate features and an endearing small child, both holding a pot in one hand and a bowl in the other, are passing by.
On the right is a group of people in varied postures conducting a tea contest by the “whisked tea” method (點茶法). One holds a long-necked kettle and pours with full attention; another turns the charcoal carefully with fire tongs; one talks while working; another boldly drains his bowl in a single draught. At the back on the right, an old man with a basket in his left hand and a tea bowl in his right seems to be on the point of leaving, but has turned his head, thinking something over …
Yao Wenhan’s Selling Drinks: tight in composition, graceful in color
Look closely and the clothing and utensils in the painting also reflect the culture of the time. For example, the young man holding the fire tongs at the front right has a four-clawed dragon pattern on his sleeve, a hint that he is a member of the imperial house. On the hem of the robe worn by the old man in the upper right appears a pattern of scattered blossoms on a brocade ground (朵花錦地紋) made up of 12 triangles, which scholars surmise may reflect the influence of Western geometry, introduced during the Kangxi reign.
The tea bowls in the painting are in monochrome porcelain glazes, first created in the Qing dynasty, among them peachbloom red, blown green, and a blue glaze carried on from the Song dynasty Cizhou kilns, among others. They are not the black Jian ware bowls that make the color of the tea easier to judge. The tea contest here, then, was probably not a contest of color, but a ranking by taste and aroma.
Original article
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