photo: Masatsugu Nokubo
Currently not on view
Farewell at a Spring River (Chun jiang song bie 春江送別 ),
1499
Shen Zhou 沈周, 1427–1509
Chinese
Ming dynasty, 1368–1644
1998-94
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 )
Dates
1499
Maker
Medium
Handscroll; ink and color on paper
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
Object Number
1998-94
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
Culture
Period
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. 6
-
"The checklist of the John B. Elliott Bequest," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 61 (2002): p. 49-99.
, p. 75
