Spotlight on National Treasures 2025-I

The lotus leaf in this painting was created through saturated ink washes, while the reeds’ leaves were painted using quick, forceful brushwork. The lotus flower, which was outlined with pale ink, has a refined appearance. A single frog rests atop the lotus leaf. The negative space used to delineate its limbs demonstrates Shen Zhou’s exacting grasp of the frog’s anatomy. The amphibian appears to be brimming with life and spirit, filling the painting with its charm. Shen once wrote a poem entitled “Chirping Frogs,” which was inspired by the sounds of frogs he heard croaking by night in the fields. 

A lone cat, its entire body curled up into a circle, is the subject of this ink wash painting. With its eyes wide open, the cat looks diagonally upwards, while its paws can be seen peeking out from beneath the bottom of its outline. Shen Zhou’s family once raised a cat, but after it ran away he wrote a poem entitled “The Lost Cat’s Journey” in which he recalled his pet’s daily activities. With its deliberate attention to detail, this work describes a cat in an utterly lifelike manner. 

Although Shen Zhou used succinct brushwork to paint this chicken, he still attended to its details with great delicacy. Employing rich transformations in the heaviness and paleness of his ink washes and the dryness and moistness of his brush, Shen vividly captured the hen’s rotund body and the textures of its fluffy plumage.  
Shen Zhou once painted a picture and wrote a poem about a chicken for one of his friends. In the poem he praised his friend’s habit of rising with the cock’s crow in order to diligently pursue his studies. Elsewhere, Shen poetically extolled chickens’ spiritedness and poise, and even wrote a poem about languidly leaning against his window and watching two cocks fight outside. These works show how Shen Zhou carefully observed and depicted living things from a variety of perspectives.