To a very fair audience on Thurs-aay last at the Royal Asiatic Society Hall, Dr. J. C. Ferguson read a particularly interesting paper on "Chinese Landscapists" a paper which was followed with the closest attention of his audience and led to some good questions at the end, the best tribute to any paper.
Dr. Ferguson traced the commencement of painting from the times when the first Chinese pictorjai art consisted in the reproduce tion of clouds, waves and mountains on jade, brasses and pottery, until with the invention and development of ink and_ brushes painting came into being in China. Contrasting western ideas of landscape painting with those of the Chinese, the speaker pointed out that the differences lay not only in the methods of work, but in the actual conception of the mission of the landscapist, that whereas the westerner composed his landscapes from many sketches and aimed at a verisimilitude to facts, the Chinese artist from the very commencement never sketched from nature, but idealized and spiritualized scenes with which he was familiar, without attempting to give his pictures any really definite locality. He utilized his subjects of clouds, mills and water for the purpose of conveying to the beholder the impressions which he had received and was perpetuating on silk.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.