LI, Kan.

Chikufu shoroku [C.: Zhupu xiang lu; Detailed Treatise on Bamboo Painting].

66 full-page woodcuts & a few woodcuts in the text. 37; 22 folding leaves. Two vols. 8vo, orig. pale blue semi-stiff patterned wrappers, new stitching, orig. block-printed title labels on upper covers (one label quite defective). From the colophon in Vol. II: Kyoto: Hayashi Ihei, 1756.

First Japanese edition of this classic painting book. Zhupu xiang lu was regarded as the medium’s major canon for the first half of the 14th century. No early Chinese edition has survived.

“Not all manuals were mediocre, however. In 1756 the Japanese edition of a bamboo manual by the Yuan master Li Kan, [the present work] was published…Li Kan, a master of both professional and idealist manifestations of the genre, modeled his ink bamboo style after the Northern Song idealist progenitor, Wen Tong, as well as on Wang Manqing…The Japanese edition is faithful to the Chinese: the impressions are clear both in the goule (outline) type of rendering and in the monochrome ink method. Li Kan’s text is a concise exegesis on the nature of the plant, the nomenclature of its parts, and the dos and don’ts in painting.”–Joan Stanley-Baker, The Transmission of Chinese Idealist Painting to Japan. Notes on the Early Phase (1661-1799) (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan, 1992), pp. 71-72.

“Author of the Bamboo Treatise (Chu-pu), which is our major early source on bamboo and bamboo painting, Li K’an (1245-1320) was the leading painter of both colored and ink bamboo of the early Yuan period. A northerner born near Peking, Li had a brilliant official career at the Mongol court, rising to become a member of the privy council of the emperor Jen-tsung (1312-20). In private life, he developed a passion for the cultivation of bamboo, as well as for bamboo lore and bamboo painting. In the Bamboo Treatise, he explained that he was sent on a mission to Indochina, where, ‘penetrating deeply into the bamboo country [he] examined strange species, and classified a great number by analyzing their resemblances and differentiating their special features’.”–Marilyn Fu, Sung and Yuan Paintings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973), p. 129.

This Japanese edition, printed throughout in kanbun, has three prefaces. The first is dated 1319, and both the second and third 1299. The 1748 afterword is by Murakami Hidenori, the initiator of this Japanese edition.

Very good and fresh set. There is some worming throughout, touching characters and images.