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With ten centuries of accumulated art to look back over, Ming masters became eclectics, painting in several different styles. The mark of the age was its delight in intimate, everyday scenes, anecdotal and often merely decorative. But with the custom of copying from old masters, along with an absorption in technique for its own sake, art came perilously close to feeding upon itself. The famed three-volume painting primer called The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, compiled between 1679 and 1701 in a small Nanking house (called the Mustard Seed Garden), broke down brush strokes into 16 different categories. Beginning painters were expected to be proficient in each of them, ranging from "hemp fibers" and "ax cuts" to "horses' teeth" and "sesame seeds." But such variety, when carried out by artists with genius at their brush tips, produced some of the most sophisticated and delightful art objects ever created. Among the Ming masters who succeeded:
¶ T'ang Yin, a contemporary of Raphael's, had a Renaissance man's gusto and love of high living. His checkered career, which began with a scandal over his civil-service exam (he came out first, then was disgraced when it was discovered that a friend had bribed the examiner), was spent between wild roistering and intense painting periods. His Gentleman and Attendants borrows T'ang Dynasty props, slims down the earlier plump models to suit Ming tastes, and comes off as a triumph in space and contrasts. But T'ang Yin could not resist slyly mocking the mood of scholarly repose. On the painting he wrote: "Miss Li Tuan-tuan of the House of Shan Ho is indeed a walking flower. In spite of all the rich men in Yangchow, she has given her love to a poor scholar." The House of Shan Ho housed the prostitutes of the day. ¶ Ch'iu Ying worked mainly in the painstaking style that dates back to the T'ang Dynasty's General Li. He was scorned for his meticulous style by a Literary Man, who said: "When he painted a snake he could not refrain from adding feet." Perhaps in reply Ch'iu Ying painted his Intellectual Conversation in the Shade of T'ung Trees, which measures nine feet tall. Done in a freer, bolder style, it is a resounding answer to his critics and a masterpiece of brush technique. ¶ Shen Chou, who inherited the Literary Man's Painting tradition, played the role of rustic philosopher, ignoring the ceremonial elegance of court life. Near the center of the new wen-jen hua movement which he founded, Painter Shen Chou retired to his garden pavilion. He depicted his ideal life in such paintings as Sitting Up at Night, wrote that he had achieved the ideal state with "one flower and one bamboo, one lamp and one small table, books of poems and volumes of classics—with them I pass the rest of my years. My friends are elderly farmers, my conversations are with the mountains, my life is devoted to gardening. News of worldly affairs does not enter my gate. Should it intrude, the breeze in the pines would waft it away."