Poetry Gathering at the Lanting Pavilion

In China’s Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420), renowned poet and calligrapher Wang Xizhi (ca. 303–361) invited forty scholars to a gathering beside a winding stream at the Lanting Pavilion (Orchid Pavilion), located at the foot of the Guiji Mountains. The weather that day was clear with a gentle breeze, and the guests are said to have greatly enjoyed themselves, sitting along the stream, writing poems, and drinking rice wine from cups that were floated past them. Literati of later centuries revered the Winding Stream at Lanting Pavilion (Chinese: Lanting Qushui; Japanese: Rantei Kyokusui) as an ideal gathering and greatly enjoyed the subject as a theme for paintings.

Artists usually depicted the subject in a vertical hanging scroll format, but Baitei here inventively arranges it as a boldly conceived horizontal composition, practically subsumed in foliage rendered with minute brushstrokes. Wang, wearing a scholar’s cap, appears seated at a red lacquer writing table in a pavilion at the top of the painting, just right of center, and literati in the midst of composing poems are dispersed along both banks of the stream. Wine cups are visible riding the current and, at bottom left, two young attendants are collecting the cups that have floated by.