Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 11. (Budapest, 1991)

FERENCZY Mária: A modernizáció megjelenése a századeleji kínai ábrázolásokon

12. SCENE WITH EIGHT PERSONS (THE ARREST OF TOU E

RH-TUN) Inventory no.: 89.37.1 Size: 59 x (98+7,5) cm Title: The Arrest of Tou Erh-tun (Na Tou Erh-tun) Signature: none. Technique: block-printed with black, green and pale orange colours; handcoloured with yellow, pink, cold light blue, warm middle blue, ultramarine, red, lilac, two shades of green, white colours and Chinese ink. (The faces are delicately drawn, the patches of clothes and objects are cruder.) Condition: The thin, yellowish paper is frazzled and incomplete on the left, the right margin is folded up, the reverse being glued to the picture side by spilt adhesive (?). The white colour on the faces has turned dark. Subject: The scene is set in a place surrounded by buildings: on both sides (nontraditional) three-storied houses with large glass windows are placed symmetrically; in the front there is an ornate brickset enclosure with a gabled gate painted green and red (behind the wall roofs and trees emerge). In the foreground there arc rocks and plants on both sides. The protagonist (Tou Erh-tun) stands near to the centre of the picture. He is long bearded, with a dark coloured painted mask, with a big, pheasant plumed headgear adorned with pompons. From his waist a spotted yellow skin hangs down. He is unarmed; the right hand grasps the beard, the left hand one of the plumes, the left foot is raised high in a rather dynamic posture. The others all turn to him, their looks and movements are directed toward him. The person on the far left raises his right hand, the one next to him makes a swinging, sweeping motion with his arms as if parrying the motion of the person in front of him who wields a sword. The third one on the left, with a big moustache, also waves his sword menacingly. Next to him to the right, to the left of Tou Erh-tun there is another person with a sword (Huang T'ien-pa), further to the right, in the background, a third person with a sword (Chu Kuang-tsu) points at the protagonist. In front of on the right there stands a man (Shen-yen Ting Ch'iian) in a long robe, behind him another person (Feng-huang Chang Ch'i) with a long beard, painted face and headgear. Explanation: The scene sugggests a scene from a play hitherto unidentified; judging by the names of the minor characters the source was probably the nineteenth-century piece of detective fiction entitled "Criminal Cases of the Magistrate Shih" (Stüh hing an, cf. ELIASBERG: p. 18.). Works of this type pertaining to popular literature offered not only entertainment, but also promised the triumph of justice. This was the reason for the popularity of the plays and New Year pictures based on them. As the stage is not a traditional one (not the terrace of a temple court, a box-like stage on a fair or an improvised pedestal that could be transformed into a palace or a battlefield in the spectators' mind), but an ensemble of foreign-style buildings, probably the courtyard of a modern school; beside the actual theme, the moment is being presented when the theatre is being transformed into a show, a mere spectacle, from rite and ideal counterpart of reality. The somewhat naive attempt at employing the linear perspective with a vanishing point in the drawing of the buildings shows the influence of European art.

44 Parallel cases are as yet unknown to me; heroes bearing the names Chu Kuang-tsu and Huang T'ien-pa do occur — e.g. in ELIASBERG: p.32. (no.8.), p.57. (no.32.),