The Ming Dynasty Page 2

The Wu School

Shen Zhou

A group of leading painters who were active in the latter part of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth came to be known as the Wu School. Wu was taken from the first character of Wuxi in the region of modern Suzhou in the Yangtze River delta, where many of them lived.

The characteristic that dominated their painting was a kind of free expression firmly anchored in the traditions of the painter’s art. There was a marked tendency for painters to work in a variety of different styles, i.e. creating a landscape painting in the style of Wa´ng Me´ng, Ni Zan or Gao Kegong. Such a tendency toward eclecticism was a natural outcome of intense interest in technique, essentially the brushstrokes in China.

There are instances when the technical perfection of brush and ink seem to have become ends in themselves. These Ming painters all shared a common literary tradition. Since many of them were as skilful in calligraphy as they were in painting, it became increasingly popular for the artist. At times his friends add poems to the images, fortifying the mood or concept embodied in the picture and presenting it through the equally expressive medium of calligraphy.

Shen Zhou was, the reputed founder of the Wu School. He came from a distinguished family of scholars and painters. He did not seek an official career in government as it was customary for his class to do. Still, He chose a quiet life devoted to his natural interest in literature and painting instead. He spent much of his time in a garden house he built outside his native town of Suzhou.

He lived a long life, producing an impressive number of handscrolls, hanging scrolls, and album leaves. His works have survived in considerable quantity – The Imperial Collection in the eighteenth century contained some one hundred and twenty-three examples.

Aside from his study with several teachers, Shen Zhou learned the art of painting through a careful and analytical study of the old masters whose work he said he could copy with excellent fidelity. Several works follow the detailed style of Wa´ng Me´ng closely, others that follow the manner of Ni Zan, but the personal style of Shen Zhou seems to be one evolved from the Yuan painter Wu Zhen as much as any other artist.

Using landscape as a sequence, like a handscroll but retaining the artist’s control of the ‘frames’ of the ‘moving pictures’, while it may have begun earlier, would seem to have first been fully exploited in the fifteenth century in the form of albums.

Poet on a Mountaintop – Shen Zhou

Among many album covers painted by Shen Zhou , ‘Poet on a Mountaintop’ stands as a good illustration of his world, which is remote but personal. That of a scholar-sage-hermit towering above the crowd. His strength was his brushstroke, through which he built a mass of structures that contained the secret of his stature in the history of Chinese painting.

Shen Zhou emerged naturally from the individualist painters of the preceding Yuan Dynasty. Still, his great natural genius combined with his intellectual understanding of painting, his sincere devotion to nature, and his prolific output established him as a leading artist of the Ming Dynasty.

Storm over a lake – Wen Zhengming

Wen Zhengming was the second great light of the Wu School and the foremost follower of Shen Zhou. His album painting ‘Storm over a Lake’ was painted early in his career when the influence of his master was paramount.

Wen Zhengming

The vocabulary of the rocks and trees in this work owes much to Shen Zhou, but they are handled in a more restrained and delicate manner and tied to a greater interest in the dramatic subject matter, which happens in this painting to be a rainstorm.

Wen Zhengming was the perfect scholar painter. He came from a family of officials, and he served as a painter in attendance at the Hanlin Academy. He retired, however, while still in his full vigour and spent the remaining thirty years of his long life among the intellectual circles of his native town Suzhou, devoting himself to poetry, calligraphy, and painting.

Above all, Wen Zhengming appears to have been respected for his character and moral integrity. Like ‘Storm on a Lake’, some of his paintings show a marked influence from Shen Zhou. Still, he soon developed his own quite distinct manner, and it is of interest that he maintained his independence under the dominant position that Shen Zhou must have held in Suzhou.

In his old age, Wen Zhengming drew ever closer to the austere and sombre spirit of the Yuan masters. In his late seventies and eighties, several paintings executed by Wen Zhengming are among the noblest and most impressive pictures by any Ming artist.

The recurrent theme, undoubtedly the artist, associated with his advanced years, is old trees, bent, twisted, and gnarled, sometimes singly, sometimes in tangled masses, that still put forth scattered clumps of leaves.

These ancient shattered trunks and limbs cling to the soil with dragon-claw roots in bleak and stony landscapes, often indicated by little more than a few rocks, a cliff, a waterfall, and a winding stream.

Landscape – Wen Boren

Wen’s followers in the Wu School included members of his own family, of whom the most notable was Wen Boren. His contribution to landscape painting is partly derived from his uncle, especially in the often complex use of dry textures.

However, there is something more significant in scale in Wen Boren’s paintings. His interest in atmosphere and usually spacious compositions owe much to Song and Yuan’s predecessors. His illustrated landscape is painted in the spirit of Wen Zhengming.

The contrast between the luxurious textures of the trees below and the space, austere distant mountains are exceptionally well realized.

Tang Yin and Qiu Ying

Tang Yin

Two painters active in the first half of the fifteenth century cannot be classified as belonging to either the Che or the Wu Schools.

Tang Yin ruined a promising career when he became involved in a scandal over the civil service examinations; he could thus no longer be considered a gentleman and spent the rest of his life between the pleasure places and wine shops of Suzhou on the one hand and the seclusion of a Buddhist temple on the other, painting for a living.

He was a friend of Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming, and because of this, he is often classed with the Wu school. But his towering mountains, painted in monochrome ink on silk, are a re-creation of the forms and conventions of the Northern Song landscapists, though with a hint of mannerism and exaggeration.

Strolling by the Stream – Tang Yin

Qiu Ying was neither a scholar nor a poet nor famed for his calligraphy; he was exclusively a painter. Born in Wuxi Xian, of lowly origins, Qiu Ying was discovered by Zhou Chen, the teacher of Tang Yin.

As a painter, Qiu Ying had a patron who established him in his mountain house. He had the time free from immediate economic problems to develop his talents. Qiu Ying lived by his art; in this sense, he was a professional painter.

Qiu Ying

Nonetheless, he was friendly with the scholar painters; Wen Zhengming greatly admired his pictures.