Leng Mei: Spring Evening Banquet at the Peach and Pear Blossom Garden (c. 1700) ; National Palace Museum, Taipei


Leng Mei's painting Spring Evening Banquet at the Peach and Pear Blossom Garden (ca. 1700) provides a wonderful opportunity to explain a great deal about Chinese art. Not only is this painting representative for a style of painting that comprises almost all earlier Chinese painting styles, it also deals with one of China's greatest poets: Li Bai.
Leng Mei, active as a painter from 1677 to 1742, specialized in figure painting and worked for the atelier of the Kangxi emperor. Spring Evening Banquet is much more than a figure painting though: it belongs to the Orthodox Style (typical of the 1700s). Its practitioners sought to create a synthesis of figure and landscape painting with the ‘Literati Style’ – which had emerged during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) - and focused on representing the painter's inner world. So the Orthodox style aimed for representing the inner and the outer world simultaneously.
The poet Li Bai, who lived some thousand years earlier, during the Tang Dynasty, is one of China's greatest poets. Li Bai was quite a character, a libertarian, who besides being an accomplished swordsman, philosopher and poet, was a great lover and advocate of booze. A substantial part of his poetry is dedicated to describing the delights of drinking.
This painting is a depiction of a Li Bai poem – written in the top left corner. We see the poet accompanied by a group of friends in a lush garden, surrounded by blossoming trees, with the mountains of Sichuan in the background. The friends are having a banquet. They are drinking and exchanging verses.
The final lines of the poem demonstrate just how well Leng Mei has succeeded in depicting the outer as well as the inner world:

The ambrosian banquet is served amid the flowers,
and the flight of the winged goblet makes us drunk under the moon.
Without fine poems how can our refined taste be satisfied?
If anyone fails to produce a poem,
let him be punished according to the rule of the Gold Valley Garden.

(text: Edgar Foley)

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