The life and art of Wen Boren (1502-1575)

This study explores the life and art of Wen Boren (1502-1575), a painter from the city of Suzhou, a leading cultural center of China. The first chapter investigates the artist's life and delineates his artistic development. Wen Boren grew up in the shadow of his immensely famous uncle, the scholar-artist Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), one of the so-called "four great Ming artists." He received a full classical education in preparation for the civil service examination, but subsequently he started to market his formidable painting skills in the "Wen tradition". He was welcomed by patrons outside Suzhou and lived for an extended period in Nanjing. Some art critics disliked the fact that he, as a literatus and leading upholder of the Wen tradition, was openly profiting from selling his paintings, and their criticisms effectively diminished Wen Boren's actual position in art history. This chapter concludes that the artist was, however, responsible for introducing the painting styles developed by the Wu School artists to a broader geographical area.;The next three chapters examine Wen Boren's works in terms of his contributions to painting genres popular in sixteenth-century Suzhou. The second chapter focuses on three topographical albums. These albums illustrate how the promotion of local culture, enthusiasm for travel, and literati antiquarian interest converge. One of the albums also sheds light on the interrelationship between patrons and the scholars they sponsored. The third chapter discusses biehaotu ("sobriquet landscapes"), a genre in which the artist illustrated a patron's sobriquet through landscape. The examples discussed here demonstrate that whenever patrons approached Wen Boren for a biehaotu, they expected something similar to what Wen Zhengming would have done. The biehaotu also strongly expresses the idea of being a "recluse in the city," an image that patrons sought to cultivate. The last chapter examines Wen Boren's paintings with Daoist themes. Wen's understanding of the Daoist classics enhanced the complexity of his compositions, and his innovations in this regard were taken up by later artists. A list of important paintings by and attributed to Wen Boren is appended.