River and Mountains in Mist

Wen Boren was a nephew of Wen Zhengming, one of “the Four Masters of the Wu School”. A government student noted for his poetry and calligraphy since young, he later gave up on officialdom and established himself in painting instead. Perpetuating the family tradition and even said to have outshone his uncle in his lifetime, he produced large-sized landscapes that are so robust that he has been counted along with Wen Zhengming’s sons Wen Jia and Wen Peng as the most outstanding of his generation in the Wen family.

The date given being the jiazi year of the Jiajing reign (1564), the painter was already in his sixties at the time of painting. Yet the execution is precise, robust and heroic, without any sign of decline and is considered to be “one of the painter’s best that cannot have been achieved without long years of practice” in the colophon dated the guimao year of the Daoguang reign (1843) by Chen Quan. In marrying the realism of the Song and the flat-distance of the Yuan, the painting is a manifestation par excellence of the elegance and lyricism characteristic of Wen Boren.

Despite the realism employed, it is hard to correlate the painting with any real landmark since there is no painter’s colophon to refer to. The only clue that can be read from the signature inscription is that it was painted in Jinling (present-day Nanjing, Jiangsu province). The scenic area provided the painter with an idea to capture 18 local scenes, each specified with an inscription, in an album dated the renshen year of the Longqing reign (1572, Shanghai Museum). Although different in date and format, these two works are quite similar in the representation of architecture, rocks, vegetation, water and fishing boats. It is therefore possible for the painting to be a mixture of both observation and imagination.

Ever since Wang Shen produced the painting River and Mountains in Mist and his friend Su Shi composed the eponymous poem in its honor, the title has been adopted by many painters including Mi Fu, Xia Gui, Qian Xuan, Zhao Mengfu, Wu Zhen and Shen Zhou from the Song to mid Ming. Even in the latter half of the Ming dynasty when it was a vogue to capture real rather than imaginary landscapes, the title was recurrent among painters of the Wu School and Songjiang School because of its literary association.