After the Gathering: A New Moon and a Clear Sky

After the Gathering: A New Moon and a Clear Sky (人散后，一钩新月天如水) is a picture by the Chinese artist Feng Zikai, first published in black and white in July 1924; this sheet is a later version in ink and colour, signed "Zikai" and dedicated to a "Mr Langdu".

Feng began making brush sketches in 1922, after Xia Mianzun invited him to teach drawing, music and English at Chunhui Middle School by Baima Lake in Zhejiang. He drew scenes that moved him and lines of classical poetry he loved on scraps of paper and the backs of cigarette packets and pinned them to his walls; Xia, Zhu Ziqing, Yu Pingbo and other colleagues urged him on. This picture was made there. Its title is a line from the Song-dynasty ci poem Qianqiu sui by Xie Yi, but Feng set it in a modern verandah: a rolled-up bamboo blind, a small table left with a teapot and cups after friends have gone, and a sliver of moon in a wide empty sky.

Zhu Ziqing and Yu Pingbo printed it in July 1924 in the first issue of Women de qiyue, the journal of their literary circle, and it became his breakthrough work. Zheng Zhenduo, editor of the Shanghai Literature Weekly, wrote that the few loose ink strokes carried him into a poetic fairyland. He then went to Feng's home with Hu Yuzhi and Ye Shengtao to choose drawings, published them from May 1925 under the heading "Zikai manhua", and in December 1925 issued Feng's first collection; the Chinese word manhua for this kind of picture spread from those publications.

The 1924 drawing was signed "TK", from the Wade-Giles spelling Tse-kai, and it was still printed in black and white in his 1945 collected cartoons. Later colour versions straighten the blind, draw the teapot and cups more precisely and add two facing rattan chairs beside the table, as this one does, here with green blinds, red pillars and a yellow moon.