Background
Shen Zhou was born in 1427 in Xiangcheng, Henan, China, into an honored and wealthy family of Shen Heng-chi and Chang Su-wan.
Shěn Zhōu
Shen Zhou was born in 1427 in Xiangcheng, Henan, China, into an honored and wealthy family of Shen Heng-chi and Chang Su-wan.
Shen Zhou’s scholarly upbringing and artistic training had instilled in him a reverence for China's historical tradition that influenced both his life and his art from an early age. He was a student of Du Qiong.
Shen Zhou never took up any official post, but instead enjoyed a long life involved in the learned arts of poetry, painting, and calligraphy. His many paintings reveal an active concern with preserving the aesthetic discoveries of bygone ages as well as a similar concern with nature in its many manifestations. However various in stylistic source and subject matter, Shen Zhou’s art consistently bears his unique touch of an abiding confidence, restrained calmness, and subtle warmth. The ideal of his life and the accomplishments of his art have earned him reverence by all artists devoted to the ideals of the literati tradition. He is regarded as one of the painting elite – “the Four Masters of Ming”, which also includes Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin, and Qiu Ying.
Shen Zhou lived at a pivotal point in the history of Chinese painting. He contributed greatly to the artistic tradition of China, founding the new Wu School in Suzhou. Under the Yuan dynasty, painters had practiced with relative freedom, cultivating a more “individualist” and innovative approach to art that deviated noticeably from the more superficial style of the Song court artists who preceded them. However, at the outset of the Ming, the Hongwu Emperor decided to import the existing master painters to his court in Nanjing, where he had the ability to cultivate their styles to conform to the paintings of the Song masters. As Hongwu was notorious for his attempts to marginalize and persecute the scholar class, that was seen as an attempt to banish the gentry’s influence from the arts.
The dominant style of the Ming court painters was called the Zhe School, as the leading figure — Dai Jin — and many of his followers were from Zhejiang province. However, following the ascension of the Yongle Emperor, the capital was moved from Nanjing to Beijing, putting a large distance between imperial influence and the city of Suzhou. Those new conditions led to the rise of the Wu School of painting, a somewhat subversive style that revived the ideal of the inspired scholar-painter in Ming China.
Shen Zhou’s scholarly upbringing and artistic training had instilled in him a reverence for China’s historical tradition that influenced both his life and his art from an early age. Magnanimous by nature, he was an able poet, essayist, calligrapher, as well as an excellent painter. His work was unsurpassed in all Chinese art for its humane feeling; the gentle and unpretentious figures he introduced gave his paintings great appeal.
Shen Zhou commanded a wide range of styles and techniques, on which he impressed his warm and vigorous personality. In landscape, he often painted in the manner of the Yuan masters, but his interpretations were more clearly structured and firmer in brushwork. It is said that Shen Zhou mainly followed the Yuan painter Wang Meng before 40. After 40, he followed the styles of Huang Gongwang, and then Wu Zhen. Shen Zhou once acquired the famous "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains" by Huang Gongwang. After it was stolen, he painted a new scroll based on his memory.
Although best known for his landscapes, Shen Zhou was equally talented in depicting flowers, fruits and vegetables, and animals in monochrome ink. He also became the first to establish among the literati painters a flower painting tradition. Shen Zhou’s flower-and-bird paintings, executed in the “sketching ideas” style, were followed with greater technical versatility by Chen Chun and Xu Wei in the Ming and then by Shitao and Zhu Da of the early Qing. Their work, in turn, served as the basis for the revival of flower-and-bird painting in the late 19th and the 20th century. The artist died in 1509.
Through Shen Zhou's eyes, a painting was not a commodity, but the very extension of the painter himself. His many paintings reveal an active concern with preserving the aesthetic discoveries of bygone ages as well as a similar concern with nature in its many manifestations.
