Seclusion in Qingbianby Wang Meng
Wang Meng was a native of Huzhou who lived from the late Yuan (1279-1368) to the early Ming (1368-1644) Dynasty. He served in the Tai'an government in the earlyMing Dynasty, was implicated and put into prison, and eventually died behind the bars. He learned painting from his grandfather on the maternal side, Zhao Mengfu, when he was young, and befriended Huang Gongwang and Ni Zan when he grew up.
Wang liked to use a very dry brush to draw dots in his pictures, and his pictures are rich in content. Wang liked to draw dense forests in the towns by theYangtze River, and his paintings are always magnificently conceived. His representative works includeSeclusion in Qingbian,Summer Residence in the MountainandReading in Spring in the Mountain.
The four great painters of the Yuan Dynasty were very careful with brush stroke techniques in order to show developed artistic ideas, and their works have great aesthetic values. Because they looked back on the old dynasty and were influenced by the artistic trend of the time, most of their works reveal a tranquil beauty divorced from reality. Their works had a big influence on the development of landscape painting in the later Ming and Qing dynasties.
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