In the Ming sixteenth-century fin-de-siècle, elite painters clung to an ideal of amateurism in art and painting. Painters such as Wen Zhengming (文徵明 1470-1567) and Dong Qichang (董其昌 1555-1636) among others championed the connoisseurship of the dilettante and disparaged those who painted to make a living. Never mind the constant exchange between literati of especially prized paintings as “gifts” and “loans,” it was the amateur intent that mattered. (The exchange of ‘gifts’ reminds me of the old “Jon Lovitz as Picasso” sketch on SNL when he would pay his bar tab by drawing a smiley face on a cocktail napkin and sign it with a flourished “PICASSO!”)
In the world of education and government, the proper gentleman was a generalist idealizing Confucius’ famous comment that the 君子 (nobleman) was not a tool/vessel. Specialization was derisively considered the domain of the merchant or the craftsman. According to Joseph Levenson, “The amateur’s scorn of professionalism has an aspect, too, of patrician contempt for the grasping climbers who were not the gentry’s sort. There were overtones of anti-commercial feeling in the scholar’s insistence that the proper artist is financially disinterested.”[1]Perhaps of even more concern to the scholar-gentleman than the professional painter were the