Page 35 - Bloch-4

There is no indication of where this might be, however, and since we cannot pinpoint its date more accurately, we are in the dark as to how to interpret its import. As a literatus who travelled, as we know, he may have done it in a studio other than his own in Beijing, but as a rule, studio names attach to the individual and it would be unusual for an artist painting in someone else's studio to borrow its name without making clear that it was not his own. It was expected of the literati that they would know the art names and studio names of famous artists, and be able to refer to them in a coded manner decipherable only to their fellow literati. To confuse this in-group code by borrowing each other's studio names was hardly the done thing, but in art anything remains possible. It may be no more than an alternative name for Ding's home in Xuannan, but for the time being we have not attributed it as such, since it appears only once on an undated bottle, leaving open too many possibilities to choose from.