The Development of Chinese Literati Painting in the Ming Dynasty

The literati painters of the Ming Dynasty were divided into two schools: one was loyal to the tradition of Song and Yuan literati painting; the other was the retro school, i.e., Dai Jin and Wu Wei, who inherited the tradition of landscape painting of the Southern Song Dynasty's "Masha" style in the resurrected Royal Academy of Painting at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. However, the literati painting of the Ming Dynasty, represented by the Wu School, pushed the literati ink and wash style laid down by the Song Dynasty to a higher stage, and its main figures were Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin, Qiu Ying, and Zhang Hong. Most of the main members of the Wu School of painters belonged to the literati who were sensitive to or experienced the perils of the career path, so they faded away from their careers and traveled to the forest to amuse themselves with poetry, calligraphy and painting, and they were still interested in the fine ink and brushwork, and they inherited the tradition of Song Dynasty paintings, which were "scholarly", to express their own character and feelings.

In the late Ming Dynasty, Suzhou painter Zhang Hong expanded the literati landscape painting new realm. By this time, literati painting had matured in both practice and theory, and Zhang Hong summarized and innovated, thus bringing traditional Chinese landscape painting, which is mainly characterized by literati painting, to full maturity. Zhang Hong's greatest influence on painting lies in the fact that he emphasized the inheritance of the brush and ink traditions of the ancients, and made the pursuit of style an important goal of art. Moreover, because of his profound cultural cultivation, he had his own aesthetic pursuits and thus a certain degree of creativity. Zhang Hong's brush and ink techniques and methods of expression had a great influence on the later painting world. Emerged a number of excellent painters who studied nature and emphasized sketching. About since the Wanli to Chongzhen (1628 ~ 1644) years of painting in the field of a new turnaround, Xu Wei further perfected the bird and flower painting in capitals, Chen Hongshou, Cui Zizhong, Ding Yunpeng, etc. created a deformation of the figure painting method, Zhang Hong, represented by Suzhou painters in the literati landscape painting in a different way to create a painting rich in the flavor of life. They inherited the style and characteristics of the Wu school of painting on the basis of innovation, return to nature, to the mountains to sketching, the division of natural creation, realized the true meaning of painting, in the painting embodied the extraordinary spiritual realm, so that landscape painting alive.