A Study On Huayan's Poem Inscribed On A Painting

Huayan is a very famous artist with good reputation in the Chinese painting history. Duringthe two hundreds years after he died, his influence and status extended increasingly. In recentyears, more and more people began to study Huayan since his painting works was popular in theworld. But people always focused their attentions on Huayan's painting since he was known of it.In fact, Huayan's refined poems were also accepted by the people at that time and latergenerations. However, due to some reasons, the studies about the art of Huayan's poems werejust some simple analysis and citations, especially his poems inscribed on paintings, till now,almost nobody cared to make inquires about it. So in this thesis, the author chose Huayan'spoems inscribed on paintings as the object of study and mainly introduced it from some aspects,such as flowers and birds, portrait, mountains and waters and so on. Moreover, according tothese studies, the author analyzed Huayan's comments on paintings, thoughts, personalities andcharacters of his poems inscribed on paintings. As a whole, Huayan was not only a literary butalso a professional painter although his life was always full of poverty. In fact, the dual status ofbeing a literary or professional painter had a great influence on his poems inscribed on paintings.As a professional painter, meeting the requirement of the market was the first precondition forHuayan's life, so many of his poems inscribed on paintings obviously showed the masses' taste.But Huayan was not content with being a professional painter purely all the time, once he couldsupport his life, he always tried his best to commit himself to the creation. Thus his works oftenshowed obvious literary taste. Huayan's poems inscribed on paintings were elegant and bold, andsuited both refined and popular taste since Huayan combined his own feelings with the commontaste. Huayan paid little attention to the significant social matters, about this, we can see from thesubject of his poems inscribed on paintings which mainly expressed his own feelings and hopesexcept some descriptions to the objective things. In fact, this feelings and hopes was just theexpression of his ideal life in which he could live with poverty, he could no need to admirewealth and he could be apart from the secular life.