The "Four Families" of Chinese Figure Painting and their respective styles?

The styles of the "Four Families" of Chinese figure painting are as follows:

Cao Zhongda was good at painting figures, portraits, and Buddhist images, and he was especially good at foreign Buddhist statues. Because of the great difference between his life and the cultural background of the Central Plains, his painting style and technique in the Central Plains seems to be obviously with exotic style. Cao Zhongda's style of painting figures with thick, fine lines is known in the history of painting as well as the style of the Tang Dynasty painter Wu Daozi's "Wu belt when the wind blows". The "Cao Family Style" summarizes the artistic style of Buddhist art during the first few centuries of its introduction into China and abroad.

Wu Daozi was good at painting Buddhism and Taoism, gods and ghosts, figures, landscapes, birds and animals, plants and trees, and pavilions, etc. He was especially good at painting Buddhism and Taoism, figures, and frescoes. His unique style of painting is the ancestor of Chinese landscape painting. He was a master of Chinese landscape painting. He painted with concise lines, and was known for his sparse style, as "the pen is only one or two, and the elephant should already be there". Su Shi once praised his art as "new ideas in the law, send the wonderful theory in the bold and unrestrained outside".

Working women, the initial study of Zhang Xuan and changes in sketching, mostly writing aristocratic women, the leisure, rich appearance, gorgeous clothes, strong and simple brushwork, soft colors, for the court, the scholarly world, known as the best of the time. His paintings of the Buddha, with their solemn appearance, were known as divine works of art. His paintings of butterflies were famous in China and abroad, and his paintings of horses, birds, animals, plants and trees were studied by many people at that time, and Cheng Yi, Gao Yun and Wei Xian were all his disciples.

Zhang was a life-long student of painstaking study, specializing in depicting the faces of people, absorbing the strengths of foreign arts such as Tianzhu, and adopting the concave and convex haloing method for the first time in Chinese painting, resulting in lifelike and lifelike figures and statues of the Buddha. Later people will be its painting method and Tang Wu Daozi and called the book style, character story painting and religious painting beyond the predecessor, also fine portrait, and custom paintings, and also work on painting the dragon, there is a dragon dotting the eyes, breaking the wall of the legend.

Expanded Information:

p>"That is to say, the "Cao Family Style" of Cao Zhongda in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the "Zhang Family Style" of Zhang Shengyao, the "Wu Family Style" of Wu Daozi in the Sheng Tang Dynasty, and the "Zhou Family Style" of Zhou Fang in the Middle and Late Tang Dynasties, all of which are characterized by the "Zhou Family Style" of Zhou Fang. "Zhou Fang of the Middle and Late Tang dynasties. Cao Zhongda is famous for his paintings of the Buddha, which are thickly folded and tightly clothed, i.e., "Cao's clothes out of the water". The statue of Buddha painted by Zhang Shengxiao, a style of its own, was called "Zhang Jia-like", one of the most influential styles in ancient temples, and was modeled by sculptors.

Wu Daozi was the first great painter of the Tang Dynasty in China, known as the "Sage of Painting" and honored as the ancestor of folk painters. His paintings were known as Wu's "Wu's Belt" and his lines were known as "Brunswick's Stripes". Zhou Fang inherited and developed Zhang Xuan's paintings of ladies, and his Buddhist statues, such as the "Water and Moon Goddess of Mercy," were regarded as models, and his figure paintings were honored by later generations as the "Zhou Family Style.

Reference:

People's Daily Online - Large-scale Historical Drama "Painting Sage" Will Reproduce the Legendary Lifetime of Wu Daozi

People's Daily Online - Large-scale Historical Drama "Painting Sage" Will Reproduce the Legendary Lifetime of Wu Daozi

People's Daily Online The Legendary Life of Wu Daozi