Background
Guan Daosheng was born in 1262 in Wu Hsing, China, into the family of Guan Shen. Her mother was a member of the Zhou clan. Guan also had two sisters.
Guan Daosheng was born in 1262 in Wu Hsing, China, into the family of Guan Shen. Her mother was a member of the Zhou clan. Guan also had two sisters.
Guan may have learned to paint from her husband; whether she received other training is unclear.
Guan became active as a painter around 1296 and as a calligrapher in 1299. It is believed that she and her husband did paintings together. Both Guan and her husband would always be welcome at the imperial court, and the Emperor Renzong would honor her entire family when he ordered calligraphies from not only her husband and son Zhao Yong, but from herself as well. At this time, she created an extended calligraphic work, the Thousand Character Classic, which so pleased the ruler. In 1289, soon after their marriage, Guan Daosheng and her husband had moved to the capital of the new Yuan state, Dadu (now Beijing).
Although Guan Daosheng had produced many highly praised works of calligraphy, as well as paintings of landscape, birds, plum blossoms, orchids, rocks, and Buddhist figures done in the traditional Song style, she dared to venture into creating important works depicting bamboo. Because of its associations with the ideal of the gentleman, bamboo was clearly a masculine preserve. An indicator of her artistic and social confidence in this regard is to be found in a bamboo handscroll done in her husband's studio in 1310, in which she wrote: "To play with brush and ink is masculine sort of thing to do, yet I made this painting. Wouldn't someone say that I have transgressed? How despicable; how despicable."
By the time Guan wrote that, her fame as a bamboo artist had spread throughout China. Her sovereign mastery of the art of monochrome black-ink resulted in her treatise, "The Bamboo in Monochrome", which after almost seven centuries remains venerated as a classic account of artistic philosophy and technique. One of Guan Daosheng's most important artistic innovations was the reintegration of bamboo into a landscape setting. Equally significant for future generations of painters were her depictions of bamboo clumps, particularly groves of the plant enveloped in mist after fresh rain.
Artists were inspired by Lady Guan's scenes of bamboo groves highlighted at the base of a series of staggered mountains in mist. Others were influenced by her novel views of bamboo panoramas, as well as by her format of low-level views of groves of tall bamboo with short, sharp leaves densely arranged over the top half of the stalks. Some art historians have suggested that she chose to paint bamboo along waterways in order to bring feminine associations to the plant's image. What is undisputed is the stunning sensitivity of the several masterpieces attributed to her brush that have survived the centuries. Those include the ink on paper hanging scroll, "Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain", created in 1308, a work that is regarded by some critics as one of the supreme masterpieces of traditional Chinese art.
Both Guan Daosheng's contemporaries and later generations esteemed her work as "a jewel" and large sums were offered for even an inch or two of silk or paper containing a specimen of her art. Both she and her husband were among the most respected artist-intellectuals of the Yuan Dynasty. In 1318, she was granted the most exalted of several titles that the emperor would bestow on her, that of Wei Kuo fu-jen, the Lady of the Wei Principality — giving the beloved artist a position approximating that of a feudal lord.
When Guan became seriously ill with a recurrence of "foot-anger illness", probably beriberi, the best physicians of the imperial court attempted to prescribe cures but to no avail and her condition deteriorated from day to day. In early May 1319, a solicitous emperor gave his permission for her to return to her home in the south. Accompanied by her husband and a son, the gravely ill Lady Guan was placed on a boat for the journey via the Grand Canal. Fifteen days later, on May 29, 1319, having still not arrived home, she died. After her death, the multi-talented Guan Daosheng quickly entered the pantheon of China's greatest artistic masters, the only woman in this cultural elite. Down through the centuries, her paintings, calligraphy, and poems have continued to be revered. She remains the first lady of painting in China's artistic Golden Age.
Both Guan Daosheng and her husband Zhao Mengfu "harbored deep Chan Buddhist faith and enjoyed friendship with monks, such as their teacher Zhongfeng Mingben and others residing in the monasteries on the Tianmu Mountains, close to their homes in Wuxing and Deqing in northern Zhejiang."
Guan married the artist Zhao Mengfu, with whom she had two sons, including Zhao Yong, and two daughters.