Nature Manipulated: Artifice and Hybridity in the Song-Painting Calico Cat under Peonies

Abstract

Through an exploration of the Song dynasty (960-1279) painting Calico Cat with Peonies I seek to reclaim the historical complexities that representations of peonies and cats evoked. This painting Calico Cat with Peonies has not received sustained scholarly attention on its unusual combination of peonies and domesticated cat (that dons a collar with leash tethered to a rock). In considering the peony, as scholarship by the Sinologist Ronald Egan has documented, the cultivation of this flower was inaugurated in the Tang dynasty (618-906), extending well into the Song dynasty. Gardeners sought to create fantastic, spectacular blooms in their efforts to outdo each other. Driven by fame and significant financial rewards, gardeners extensively hybridized peonies. Prominent scholars-officials, such as Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072) who were initially seduced by the beauty of these many varieties, re-evaluated their positions and wrote treatises to question the value of such showmanship artifice. To put somewhat dramatically in current parlance, Song scholars began a critical discussion on the merits of “genetically modified organisms.” Concurrent with this “peony-mania” (as Egan has described it), scholar-officials put brush to paper to express concerns about the changing natures of the cat as it underwent the process of domestication. In the Tang, the eminent scholar-official Han Yu (768-824) wrote essays on the nature or xing of the cat as a reflection of its environment (good, morally responsible people have good, morally responsible felines). Other writers complained that the basic nature of the cat was compromised through domestication. A wild cat is compelled to chase rats, whereas a house-cat is morally adrift, luxuriating in a comfortable home and given free meals. I regard such philosophical and scientific ruminations as informing this painting and are central to understanding it. With the Song’s great exploration of knowledge of the world, flowers were regarded as subject matter worthy of investigation. Preliminary research indicates this is also the case for felines. In my argument, images of peonies with or without cats became what the art historian James Cahill has described as pictorial complements to the analytic investigation of the physical world. Paintings like Calico Cat with Peonies are consistent with Song developments in Neo-Confucianist studies that are referred to as Ge wu zhi zhi (Investigation of things and perfection of knowledge). The painting Calico Cat with Peonies negotiates and proposes novel insights into concerns about man's roles in nature and in society.