Painting Hearts, Writing Minds—Warmth and Sentiment in Calligraphy and Painting

Shen Zhou, Ming dynasty

Shen Zhou (1427-1509) painted this work to celebrate his teacher Chen Kuan’s seventieth birthday. The painting borrows the height of Mount Lu’s soaring peaks as a device to extol Shen’s mentor’s virtuous character. It depicts a river valley cutting through densely packed mountains, with contiguous peaks gently unfurling into the distance amid swirling mists. The massifs tightly overlay one another in the middle ground, with a waterfall cascading downward on the left hand side. The diagonal rock wall in the painting’s center, the negative space in its upper region, the slightly heavier washes at its edges, and the mountains in the background all conspire to create a sense of layered spatiality. The texturing of this work’s mountains and boulders were all rendered using brushwork derived from Yuan dynasty painter Wang Meng’s (1308-1385) intricate, rhythmic painting style, filling the work with exuberant vivaciousness. Toward the bottom of the painting, a solitary figure stands on the riverbank, the tininess of his form serving as a foil for the mountains’ imposing enormity. Shen Zhou complemented this painting with a lengthy calligraphic inscription of a poem, openly displaying his admiration for his teacher. 

Xiang Yuanbian, Ming dynasty
Paper

Xiang Yuanbian (1525-1590) had the style name Zijing and the sobriquet Molin Jushi (“Recluse from the Forest of Ink”). A famous Ming dynasty art collector, he was highly versed in calligraphy, painting, and connoisseurship. Xiang painted at the request of a friend, as a gift for him to present at his father’s birthday. The painting depicts two slender stalks of bamboo standing beside a rock on a hillside. The two bamboo stalks—one painted with dark ink, the other with pale ink—are in compelling contrast with one another. The artist used varied painting techniques to elicit the qualities of this piece’s subjects, painting the stone with unsophisticated, unrestrained brushwork, while portraying the bamboo with great delicacy.

The inscription mentions that this painting draws inspiration from Su Shi (1037-1101). Su Shi once visited the Shouxing Temple in Hangzhou. Later, during his period of banishment in Huangzhou (1080-1084), he wrote a poetic ode to the forest of bamboo growing on the monastery’s grounds whilst reminiscing over his time in Hangzhou. Some years later, in 1090, he presented that poem as a gift to the Zen Buddhist monk Tongwu. As the person who received this painting as a birthday gift was also an ardent believer in Zen Buddhism, its conceptualization was imbued with an additional layer of meaning. 

Xu Yang, Qing dynasty
Paper

Xu Yang (ca. 1712-1779) was a native of Suzhou in Jiangsu province. When Qing dynasty emperor Gaozong visited Suzhou during his first expedition to southern China, Xu Yang presented him with an album of paintings, and as a result secured employment in the imperial court. 

Master Red Pine and the Elder of the Yellow Rock are both Taoist immortals written about in legends. In the Hagiographies of the Immortals (traditionally attributed to Liu Xiang, though possibly written by others), it is recorded that Red Pine was a long-lived divine being who oversaw the rain: “Master Red Pine was a rainmaker who lived in the time of Shen Nong, the Divine Husbandman. ” In the chapter entitled “The House of the Marquis of Liu” in The Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian wrote that the Elder of the Yellow Rock taught the arts of war to Zhang Liang atop a bridge in Xiapei (present-day Peizhou in Jiangsu province). This painting uses a clear and attractive selection of colors to depict a red pine tree, a yellow stone, and jade-green bamboo stalks. The composition is tidily layered, the tall and straight pine tree featuring a single branch that has gone askew and yet seems to be in harmonious accord with the bamboo and stone below. The inscription atop this painting tells us that it was painted as a birthday gift to wish Emperor Qianlong a long life. 

Huang Yue, Qing dynasty
Silk

Huang Yue (1750-1841) served as a scholar-official throughout the Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang reigns during the Qing dynasty. He was a talented painter of landscapes, flowering plants, and scenery depicting the lives of the common people. This painting, which was included in an album entitled Auspicious Symbols of Long Life, features calligraphy in its upper portion written by the Jiaqing Emperor’s son Aisin Gioro Miankai (1795-1838), wishing his father longevity and praying for prosperity throughout the imperial realm. 

This painting draws its subject matter from lyrics found in “Heaven Protects,” an ode recorded in the chapter “Lesser Court Hymns” in the ancient Book of Songs. The “Southern Mountains” mentioned in this ode, which was written in the voice of a minister offering praise and good wishes to a sovereign, may refer to the Zhongnan Mountains (located in present-day Shaanxi province, these mountains belong to the Qinling mountain range). A dense profusion of boulders and pine trees can be seen in the near ground in the painting’s lower left. A person stands atop a patch of flat ground, his hands clasped in a gesture of respect as he faces the mountain in the distance. The striking contrast between the minuteness of this figure and the enormity of the towering peak only increases the mountain’s majesty.   

Yu Fei-an, Republican period
Paper
Donated to the NPM by Mr. Lin Tsung-yi

Yu Fei-an (1889-1959) was born Yu Chao; his style name was Fei-an and he used the sobriquets Hsien-jen, Wen-jen, and Lao-fei (“Man of Leisure,” “Listener,” and “Old Fei”). Skilled at painting works in the flowers-and-birds genre using gongbi techniques, Yu was a perspicacious observer who portrayed the objects of the natural world in a vivid, lifelike manner. He combined the traditional painting technique of using double outlines filled with colors along with elements of folk painting, producing works in which newness and creativity emerge from within an ambience of classical refinement. 

This piece, painted against a backdrop of azurite pigment, depicts a pair of cranes soaring in a cerulean sky between whorls of auspicious clouds and the tops of pine trees. This painting, created for the artist’s younger brother Hsin-an’s fifty-ninth birthday, employs pine trees and cranes as symbols of longevity. Yu used vigorous, forceful linework and a dazzlingly bright color palette, filling the entire work with a strong sense of ornamentation.