Fruits and Flowers Leaf 1

A native of Quanzhou (present-day Guilin, Guangxi province) and a descendent of Zhu Zanyi, or Prince of Jingjiang, Shitao was known as Zhu Ruoji before taking Buddhist monastic vows. He was the only survivor of his family, who perished in a struggle for the Southern Ming throne, and went into hiding at a monastery after his rescue by a servant. Having sojourned in Mount Lu, Xuancheng and Nanjing, visited Mount Huang many times and stayed in Beijing in an attempt to establish a career in painting, the seasoned traveler settled in Yangzhou as a professional painter in his late years and was converted to Daoism. The robustness that the deviant developed in the process eventually gained recognition with a lasting legacy in Yangzhou, where he spent his late years.

Noteworthy painters specializing in fruits and vegetables were documented as early as the Tang and the Five Dynasties. By the Song dynasty, paintings of fruits, vegetables, herbs and insects were entered together as a genre in Xuanhe Huapu (Catalogue of Paintings in the Imperial Xuanhe Collection) with a remark that capturing their niceties is most challenging and is impossible without an exceptional perception. In the Ming dynasty, Shen Zhou kindled many poet-painters’ interest in representing these objects in the expressive style. Very much in the same tradition is this album by Shitao, recording not only the fertility of Yangzhou but also his love for fruits and vegetables in the inscriptions. To further add a poetic touch to his paintings, he even copied from three poets for an inscription on the leaf that features water chestnuts and the prickly water lily. The present album of fruits and flowers, described with apparent spontaneity but in fact calculation, is the artist’s work in Yangzhou in his late years.