Bamboo-Covered Stream in Spring Rain

This fifty-foot composition reveals a “slit-view” perspective of bamboo growing along a stream. In single brushstrokes of varied tonality, leaves and stalks are depicted close up, cut off at top and bottom. Xia Chang executed this painting with great breadth and boldness as a gift for a friend who had planted a bamboo grove around his retirement villa. As it bends without breaking, bamboo evoked human values of resiliency and endurance for intellectual painters of premodern China. Xia’s dedicatory inscription on this scroll, describing the bamboo garden as “washing away ordinary thought,” expresses their desire for retreat from the trials of official life. He had served the government in roles of calligrapher, draftsman, and administrative secretary before retiring for a decade in 1439, initially to care for his aged mother. This painting exhibits his style of angular rocks, ink-washed shoreline, and fluent brushwork that matured during that period.