Page 431 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

relationship by marriage to the imperial family,
along with his native ability and subtlety, enabled
him to endure and prevail amid the swarming
intrigues of court and army during the middle
Ming period. He was also a learned student of his
region, editing gazetteers of Suzhou and of the
Lake Tai area. His calligraphy, prose, and poetry
were much admired.
Shen Zhou was primarily a landscape painter;
for him, flowers or "fur and feathers'' were infre-
quent subjects. This Pomegranate and Melon pic-
ture is one of his very best essays in the genre —
an opinion concurred in by Liang Qingbiao, one of
the two or three greatest collectors in Chinese art
history, who included this work among the rela-
tively small number of Ming paintings in a vast
collection devoted primarily to earlier works.
S.E.L.

285
Zhu Yunming
1461-1527
THOUSAND-CHARACTER ESSAY

dated to 1523
Chinese
handscroll; ink on paper
7
31.1 x 372.9 (i2V4 x i46 /s)
reference: New Haven 1977
National Palace Museum, Taipei

. . . Although my brushwork is clumsy, it has
never before come out like this. On the i6th
day of the 4th intercalary month of the year
[1523], I went by Yunzhuang's house. After
drinking wine, he brought out some sutra paper
and requested me to write the Thousand-
Character Essay. Yunzhuang and I are close
friends, so I forced myself to write this, but it
will certainly be laughed at even by the gener-
ous. The old wood-gatherer of Zhi Mountain,
Zhu Yunming.
The Qian Zf Wen, or Thousand-Character Essay,
employs one thousand characters, each only once.
At least two partly differing versions of the text
are known. Authorship of the original essay is
also unclear, but one tradition holds that Zhong
You (151-230) was the first to write the text and
that Wang Xizhi (303 7-361 ?) followed him.
During the Sui dynasty (589-618) a descendant of
Wang Xizhi, the monk Zhi-Yong (act. late 6th
century), over a period of about thirty years wrote
some eight hundred copies of the text in his
ancestor's style of calligraphy and distributed
them among various monasteries, thereby ensur-
ing that Wang's style gained ever greater accep-
tance and authority. The Qian Zi Wen attained
great pedagogical importance, for it was often
written employing a different mode of script in
430 CIRCA 1492