Portfolio Three: Guo Xi's "Early Spring"

In his book, Chinese Painting, James Cahill gives a non-ekphrastic description of Guo Xi's Early Spring.  It seems that he does not offer an image of the painting, choosing instead to include an image of Guo Xi's Autumn in the River Valley, to which his survey quickly turns.  Thus, in some way, Cahill's description is intended to stand in for the image in our minds.  Yet he does not offer an objective description of the painting which would approximate its appearance in our minds, but rather uses a combination of what Michael Baxandall would call cause words, comparison words and effect words.

Cahill starts by describing the "earth forms" which are "swollen to an exaggerated rotundity."  These same earth forms, Cahill claims, are "deeply undercut" and even "altered."  All this refers to the making of the painting, which does not so much as actually describe the artist's process but rather describes what the art historian observes (and speculates) about the process by virtue of the works' effect on him.  Comparison words are used as well, often in simple impressionistic phrases like "the spidery bare trees" and in some adverbial phrases, like "the shadows flicker mysteriously."  Elsewhere, Cahill describes the lines in the painting as "nervous" and "wavering" which simultaneously personifies the lines as having an erratic personality (comparison words) and speculates about the lines' creation, suggesting that the way the lines were painting was in a nervous or wavering fashion.  

Rather than objectively describe the picture, language like this requires the reader to map aspects of the vehicle (spider, for instance) onto its tenor (in this case, the tree).  The meaning that the reader gets out of the figure (that is, the specific combination of features which the reader maps from spider to tree) is ultimately indeterminate, but the author's intention is not to create in the reader's mind an image of the tree which would correspond to the tree as it appears in the painting, but rather to give a combined sense of the image's appearance and its effect on a viewer.  With non-ekphrastic, metaphoric language, Cahill can build an argument towards an overall effect.  He says that the painting as a whole is is grandiose but "unsettling" and suggests "a turbulent vision of the world in flux."