Examples of ancient painters striving for perfection

[Reprinted] During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, meticulous painting was generally deepened and refined.

During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, flowers, birds and landscapes were basically dominant, especially in the Painting Academy of the Song Dynasty. Because Song Huizong and Evonne liked painting and calligraphy, they especially improved the status of painters in the painting academy at that time. Due to the emperor's own high level of painting and calligraphy, with his advocacy and encouragement, the painters of the Academy of Painting approved the gold ribbon, and the examination system of the Academy of Painting also used poetry as the topic to test painting. Under the emperor's advocacy and attention, a large number of talented painters were recruited into the academy and trained, and meticulous painting was more exquisite and prosperous than before. In a word, the achievements of the Academy of Painting are great. Zhao Qian was an incompetent emperor in the history of China, but he was an outstanding painter and art educator. His heavy color painting is exquisite in brushwork, gorgeous in artistic conception and rich in painting meaning. There are Zhang Xuan's pictures of Tao Ren, You Chuntu, Guo's wife, Ruihe, Guo Hong White Goose, etc. It can be said that people and landscapes are exquisite. The existing Wenhui Map in Taiwan Province Province is more than six meters, with more than 30 people (scholars) on it. The table is full of wine, with extremely hot wine next to it. The willow double hook is filled with stone green, which is Evonne's masterpiece. Evonne also created a "thin gold style". Later, many people, such as the late Wu Hufan and Yin Fei, just learned his calligraphy style. In the Song Dynasty, Li could draw anything, especially the characters. In addition, there are Song Li, Su Hanchen and Su Hanchen's paintings piled with gold powder, specializing in genre paintings such as baby play pictures, which can also be said to be the founders of New Year pictures. Zhang Zeduan's The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival is a very great genre painting. He created a light crimson painting method, and his meticulous brushwork is also quite good. His other painting, Winning the Bid at Midnight, was heavily colored. He also painted murals.

In the first year of Song Xining, Zhao Chang carried out the reform of flower-and-bird painting. He was mainly dissatisfied with the yellow flower-and-bird paintings, but advocated sketching, demanding a new expression method, and called himself "Sketching Zhao Chang". "Every morning, the morning dew comes down, leaning on the bar to enjoy, and writing with colored pens." In the future, Yi Yuanji also advocated sketching. He planted trees and flowers around the house, which attracted many birds, and also smashed the window paper in the house to observe and sketch. He also travels in the mountains and observes the habits of apes, so his paintings of apes are also very good, such as the portrait of an ape handed down from generation to generation. I've seen another photo of him playing with a monkey. It is said that in order to paint this picture, he once went into the mountains and lived with monkeys for more than a year. Because he is familiar with the life of apes, he can fully show the modality of apes in valleys and streams. Unfortunately, this volume has already flowed into Japan. There were many flower-and-bird painters in Song Dynasty, and Cui Bai was one of them. He also advocated reform. However, most of their works belong to the flower-and-bird painting school, such as Yi Yuanji's Monkey Playing and Cui Bai's representative works, such as Lu Yan and Bamboo Gull Map, which belong to this light color school rather than heavy color school. The expert painters and advocates of meticulous flower-and-bird painting in Song Dynasty should be Song Huizong and Evonne. Under his advocacy and reward, the Song Dynasty Painting Academy gathered many painters who specialized in flower and bird painting, such as Lin Chun and Li Di, who all showed outstanding performance in meticulous flower and bird painting. Therefore, the painting circle at that time was quickly replaced by the meticulous flower-and-bird painting of the "courtyard style" at that time, which gained the upper hand. There are large flower-and-bird paintings in the Forbidden City, depicting an eagle chasing a rabbit. The eagle stood on an old tree and was about to rush down. A rabbit is jumping around below, which is very wonderful. This is a masterpiece that Li Di has only seen in recent years. I've seen his short piece "Chickens to Feed" before. Some newly hatched chicks seem to be waiting for someone to feed them later. It's really lifelike.

Landscape painters such as Zhao and Wang Ximeng appeared in Song Dynasty. Zhao has a large "Fairy Hill Pavilion", a big turquoise, which is now in Taiwan Province Province. Wang Ximeng is an excellent student in Evonne and a student of the Academy of Painting. Evonne taught him how to draw great green mountains and rivers, and in less than a year, he finished "A Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers". This picture is beautiful, green hills are thousands of miles away, fishermen come and go in the boathouse, and the smoke is vast, almost thousands of miles away. Wang Ximeng was only twenty-two years old when he died of illness. This picture of a thousand miles of mountains and rivers is a rare treasure left by Wang Ximeng. Of course, in the Song Dynasty, Wang Ximeng was not the representative of painting Daqingshanchuan, and Zhao Boju was the first one. Bo lives thousands of miles, and Di Bosu is a royal family in the Song Dynasty, and is a master of the green landscape in the Song Dynasty. Zhao's masterpiece is a picture of autumn scenery in the Forbidden City. In this long scroll, he skillfully used the harmonious painting method of turquoise and ochre yellow to draw the ups and downs of mountains and autumn scenery, giving people a feeling of crisp autumn. As we know, the traditional meticulous painting with heavy colors has reached its peak and is extremely mature in Song Dynasty painting. No matter figures, landscapes, flowers and birds, boundary paintings or works with strong colors (including murals and scroll paintings), in terms of quantity, they are more than any dynasty. Among them, as far as landscaping is concerned, Song Li, Liu Songnian and others are good at green. At the same time, Liu Songnian also created a small turquoise landscape painting method, which is a painting method that can highlight the painting method after painting with thin turquoise. It is a pity to look back at the green landscape painting, but the lack of green and colorful painting methods that serve the present will inevitably cast a shadow over the splendid mountains and rivers.

As mentioned above, the Song Dynasty Painting Academy absorbed a large number of accomplished painters; Formed a school of institutional painting. Some are small boutique "small paintings" without signatures. For example, the flowers and leaves of a group of Xifu begonia in "Begonia Wind Butterfly" are fluttering in the spring breeze, and a butterfly wants to land on the branch, but it won't let it fall. It seems that I can feel the wings of butterflies shaking in the wind, which is wonderful. Another example is Xiao Yuanguang's meticulous landscape sketch, signed by Dong Li, which depicts a snow scene. There is a river ahead, and there is a small restaurant by the river. There is only one person drinking there. A fisherman was on a boat with fresh fish and stopped at a restaurant hut by the river to sell fish. The atmosphere is good. These sketches are basically meticulous or turquoise. Although the picture frame is small, it shows a lot of things. They are small in size, far-reaching in artistic conception and vast in the world. Looks like they can walk in. And "Fruitful Birds". The apple in the picture is well drawn. I have been to the fruit farm in the suburbs of Beijing and learned some pruning techniques, so I saw that the fruit branches on the painting were very neat. This shows that the painters at that time were deeply involved in life. We may not be able to do it today. There are water hibiscus, myna,

At the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, Ren Renfa and Qian Shunju, headed by Zhao, advocated learning from the past and opposed the tradition of the Song Academy of Painting. Their meticulous painting style is simpler than that of the Song Dynasty. Zhao's paintings include Drinking Horses in Autumn Suburbs. ), "Lohan in Red". His paintings have a simple taste in the beauty of meticulous brushwork, which is different from the slender and rich style of Song Dynasty. Ren Renfa's masterpiece, Tussah's "Two Horses", draws two fat horses with heavy colors. The fat horse has orange-white spots and the thin horse is brown, which is lifelike. Qian Shunju's paintings include House in Fulan Mountain, Flowers and Birds, Bai Lianhua and so on. Some time ago, I saw a photo of Ren Renfa playing the emperor on the cover of an English magazine. In the photo, Zhang, one of the traditional Eight Immortals, performed magic in front of Tang. He picked up a small paper donkey and blew it on the ground, with a picture of Tang in the middle, showing a surprised look. Zhang is very proud. He drew a child here, opened a bag and the donkey ran out of it. The colors of this painting are all heavy colors, bright and deep. It is really a treasure. Qian Shun's paintings include "Zhao Taizu Cuju Map" (that is, kicking a ball) and so on. In the mid-Yuan Dynasty, Wang Zhenpeng drew "Revealing Bowl" and "Daming Palace", which are world-famous masterpieces. In addition, the Forbidden City has a picture of Yueyang Tower painted by Wang Zhenpeng. The characters in the pavilion are all very good and unscathed. What is even more rare is that the whole story of Yueyang Tower is written in the gap of the sky picture, which can only be seen clearly with a microscope. When Rong Baozhai copied it, he copied it with photos, because it was impossible to engrave it. In Yuan Dynasty, literati painting rose, and ink painting dominated. After the mid-Yuan Dynasty, ink painting was almost uniform, and meticulous painting was degraded and rejected. Meticulous painting is considered to be the work of craftsmen, and it is impossible to be elegant. This prejudice of raising ink painting and belittling color painting has been influenced for a long time, and it can be said that this prejudice still exists today. But in the Yuan Dynasty, the situation of folk painters was different. For example, the murals painted by Zhu and other painters in many temples in Shanxi fully show the prosperity of meticulous painting. Another example is the Yongle Palace mural, which is magnificent in bearing, steady and powerful in line organization and brilliant in color, reaching an amazing level, compared with some literati paintings, it looks pale and powerless.

As far as the overall situation of murals is concerned, by the Song Dynasty, it had declined and was not as prosperous as the Tang and Five Dynasties. At this time, scroll painting is mainly used. However, in the history of painting, there are still many murals in the Song Dynasty. However, not all murals in this period are heavy colors, and many murals belong to ink or light crimson. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Su Shi and Wen Tong painted ink bamboo on the wall, while Guo, Li Cheng and Fan Kuan also painted landscapes on the wall with pale crimson, which were not all heavy colors, but mostly Taoist figures, pavilions, flowers and birds. But in the Yuan Dynasty, the murals such as Yongle Palace in Shanxi were not like this, and the murals were completely colorful.

Let's talk about vivid paintings in the Song and Yuan Dynasties.

Vivid painting is now portrait painting, also called portrait painting. Because there were no photos in ancient times, people, especially the elderly, wanted to leave their own images, or the whole family, or several people together to draw images as family souvenirs, just like we take pictures today. This kind of portrait generally requires drawing a front image, not a profile image. This vivid painting is meticulous.

Ancient vivid paintings include head portraits, busts and full-length portraits. At that time, many professional painters and folk painters specialized in this vivid painting.

According to historical records, this vivid painting has existed since the Western Han Dynasty, such as Mao Yanshou. Wang Zhaojun was sent to the Western Regions for his portrait, and Mao Yanshou was killed for his portrait. This is a story that has been handed down for thousands of years. Mao Yanshou is the organizer of Emperor Wendi's royal painter. It can be seen that as a professional figure painter, it has existed since the Western Han Dynasty, and in the Tang Dynasty, there were also many figure painters who occasionally engaged in figure painting activities. For example, Zhou Fang, a famous figure painter in the Tang Dynasty, and Han Gan, a famous pommel horse painter at that time, both painted portraits of Zhao Zongshilang, the son-in-law of the famous Guo Ziyi at that time. After the portrait was finished, Guo Ziyi asked her daughter which of the two paintings was more similar. His daughter said, "Han Demei, Zhou Deshen." In other words, Han Gan can't compare with last week's boat. Han can only be about the same, Zhou can be about the same. From these historical facts and comments, we can see that vivid paintings were not only extremely common in the Tang Dynasty, but also appreciated by ordinary people. In Zhou Wenju's "Five Dynasties Palace Maids", a painter painted a portrait of a palace maid, and there was an easel in front of the painter, which truly reflected the situation of the portrait at that time.

The figure painting in Song Dynasty was more prosperous than that in Tang Dynasty, and penetrated into the general public more generally, but there was a lack of representative figure painters. There are hundreds of portraits of celebrities, such as Statues of Emperors and Celebrities of Past Dynasties (now Taiwan Province Province), which are larger than those of real people. For example, Zhu Yuanzhang has two paintings, one is more formal, and the other is a mouth with freckles and a pig's mouth. It is said that the statues of these emperors have a certain basis, and they are very well painted and the colors are very thick and gorgeous. Are painted with the best mineral pigments. It is said that the portraits of Fuxi and Dayu were painted by Marin, the son of Ma Yuan in the Song Dynasty. Although heavy color painting is used, we can still see the shadow of Ma Yuan School in style. These more than 200 sleeves of emperors and ministers represented the highest level of portrait painting at that time. There is also a small album of portraits of famous ministers and emperors, which is also very exquisite.

The vivid paintings in this period all show men's men, skin color, bone ups and downs, muscle uplift, turning changes and so on with different faces and different colors. It's really a bright and compelling situation. However, the figure painting in the Song Dynasty did not emphasize the overlapping rendering of concave and convex, and the light always came from the front, without side light and light. At that time, some portrait painters were able to draw the image of a person 30 years before his death according to his remains, and after painting, his family cried, which shows how vivid the painting was. At that time, vivid painting observation was very keen, and they even had to make friends with the painter, understand his emotions and show the expression that best represented his character. Wang Yi in Yuan Dynasty was famous for his portraits. He pushed figure painting to a new stage and raised his practical experience to the height of theory. The secret of portrait is very valuable. He emphasized the observation and expression of people's true nature, and wanted to paint when the other person screamed, so as to "close your eyes as if you were in front of your eyes and put your pen at the bottom of your pen" and opposed the way of death of "sitting in danger and writing" and "carving people like wood carving". He also pointed out how to observe the characteristics of various people and expressions. His works also include painting methods, drawing up 45 methods of mixing pigments, which colors should be used and which colors should be matched. So is the portrait of Zeng whale in Ming Dynasty. Everyone's face (color) is different at different times and under different emotions. Just one color changes endlessly and is extremely subtle. These methods are all described in painting.