photo: Masatsugu Nokubo
Interpretation
Shen Zhou is known as the father of the Wu school of painting (Wu is the ancient name for the city of Suzhou). Choosing to live a life of quiet retirement, he exemplified the scholar-artist ideal of painting and calligraphy as a form of self-cultivation. Shen developed a new formal idiom of calligraphic abstraction in painting, and in his later works, he emphasized picture surface with simple brushwork and flat shapes. Painted at the age of seventy-three, Farewell at a Spring River shows a parting by a riverbank outside the city walls. “Parting at the shore” was a common theme of paintings created as farewell presents to commemorate personal friendships and scholarly fellowship.
Information
- Title
- Farewell at a Spring River (Chun jiang song bie 春江送別 )
- Object Number
- 1998-94
- Maker
- Shen Zhou 沈周
- Medium
- Handscroll; ink and color on paper
- Dates
- 1499
- Dimensions
- Painting: 26 x 152.3 cm. (10 1/4 x 59 15/16 in.) Colophons: 26.9 x 122.5 cm. (10 9/16 x 48 1/4 in.) Mount: h. 30.2 cm. (11 7/8 in.)
- Credit Line
- Bequest of John B. Elliott, Class of 1951
- Culture
- Chinese
- Period
- Ming dynasty
- Place made
- Asia, China
- Signatures
- signed "Shen Zhou of Changzhou made this in his seventy-third sui."
- Marks/Labels/Seals
- Artist, "Qi'nan" 啟南, square relief, at signature
Collectors' seals: see Images of the Mind, cat. no. 15.
Two columns of characters in ink on label adhered to rolled scroll
- Type
- Materials
–1998 John B. Elliott (Princeton, NJ), by bequest to the Princeton University Art Museum, 1998.
- Wen C. Fong, Images of the mind: selections from the Edward L. Elliott family and John B. Elliott collections of Chinese calligraphy and painting at the Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1984)., cat. no. 15
- "The checklist of the John B. Elliott Bequest," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 61 (2002): p. 49-99., p. 76
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