Introduction: Zhejiang school is an important genre in the history of art in the Ming Dynasty, which was popular in the painting world before and after the Ming Dynasty, and Zhejiang painters paid attention to diversified folk life, showing an emerging secular aesthetic taste in artistic concepts and style styles.
The earliest mention of the name of the "Zhejiang School" is the late Ming Dynasty calligrapher and collector Dong Qichang, who believes that the mountains and rivers in Jiangsu and Zhejiang have been beautiful and have been full of talents since ancient times. Not only are there great artists such as Zhao Meng, Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Wang Meng and so on in the Yuan Dynasty, but also the painter Dai Jin in the Ming Dynasty period is also a leader in the painting world, so he is named "Zhejiang School".
However, after Dai Jin and others made ancient works, the Wumen School and the Songjiang School of painting rose one after another, the preference of literati and inkers for painting style changed.
In the commentaries of late Ming paintings such as Zhu Haoliangjun and Zhan Jingfeng, the courtyard paintings depicted in detail with a brush stroke are regarded as works that are "vivid and full of charm", and it is believed that the literati should not imitate this style. The artistic achievements of Dai Jin, Wu Wei and others are increasingly forgotten in this style orientation.
The source of the Zhejiang school, Guo Xi of the Northern Song Dynasty
If we talk about the genre of ancient Chinese painting, the Zhejiang school must be one of the first to be mentioned. It is a major genre officially named in the history of Chinese painting, and like the Wumen School and the Songjiang School, it is also mainly based on the similarity of regions and the similarity of painting styles.
However, when discussing the "Zhejiang School", it is also necessary to review the pioneer of the Zhejiang School, the Southern Song Dynasty.
Among the many court painters enshrined in the Southern Song Dynasty, especially Li Tang, Liu Songnian, Ma Yuan, and Xia Gui, who were the most famous, and were called the four masters of the Southern Song Dynasty. They paid attention to the style of landscape painting with formal law and bold brush and ink, which had a far-reaching influence on Zhejiang painters.
But before that, there was an earlier painter who had a profound influence on Dai Jin's painting style, he was the Northern Song Dynasty painter Guo Xi.
In Guo Xi's painting career, he tried to break through the tradition that had gradually become a fence from both spiritual and technical aspects, for the content of painting, he was not satisfied with the early Northern Song Dynasty landscape painters' general and mediocre grasp of natural landscapes, but believed that nature should have four scenes, there should be different seasonal changes, he advocated more in-depth observation of the changes in mountains and trees in various situations, according to the different feelings of different people to make specific and meticulous descriptions.
Therefore, the natural change in this situation is a change of feelings, just like Xin Zhiyi said, "I see how feminine qingshan is, and I should be like this when I see Qingshan", which is a kind of emotional transfer, so it will have more of the painter's subjective emotions.
In order to realize this new pursuit, he proposed that the painter should cultivate and expand, read and pass through many, in order to achieve the essence of the final extraction. In line with this aesthetic proposition is Guo Xi's bold innovation in his artistic practice, exploring new forms of painting in his works.
We can see that an unprecedented brush-and-ink effect appeared in his works, and the free-flowing side-peak wet pen used a kind of painting method with a continuous dyeing method to paint a special ink charm that was suitable for thickness and lightness. And this is the new style of the Southern Song Dynasty painting school "ink cangjin".
The backbone of the Zhejiang faction, Dai Jin and Wu Wei
The early paintings of Dai Jin and Wu Wei formally inherited this style of "ink and ink vigorousness" of the Southern Song Dynasty, and they were even more elegant in the control of pen and ink, which was more than that of the ancestors of the Southern Song Dynasty.
However, it is not enough to talk about the introverted and implicit ratio of the sincere situation of the Southern Song Dynasty painting school, of course, this is also related to the local situation at that time, the Southern Song Painting School naturally had a domineering and inspiring atmosphere derived from the sense of national crisis in the later period, and the passionate enthusiasm for reality also ceased to exist with the waves of history.
Today's scholars generally refer to painters who directly or indirectly inherit Dai Jin and whose works have a similar style to Dai Jin's as Zhejiang painters.
Dai Jin's landscape paintings can be roughly divided into two categories. One type of work is the use of axe splitting as the main painting technique. Dai Jin has made some innovations on the basis of learning the "Ma Xia" painting technique, and the mountain stones he paints are more sharp and vigorous, the ink color of the picture is more intense, the ink color contrast is strong, and it is more powerful and strong.
Another type of painting also uses axe splitting, but in general, it is mainly based on light ink paving, and the axe splitting painting method is used in the protruding places of mountain stones, and the pen is bright. Because most of the pictures are light ink, in order to strengthen the comparison, Dai Jin used thick ink to paint trees and distant mountains, forming a foggy effect, compared with the first type of works, the picture is more ethereal, there is a kind of Poetry like the Landscape Painting of the Southern Song Dynasty.
It can be said that Dai Jin's landscape paintings have more freehand than the southern Song Dynasty landscape paintings, which is inseparable from the influence of landscape paintings in the Yuan Dynasty.
On the basis of inheriting Dai Jin's painting method, The slightly later Wu Wei showed a more wild and uninhibited personality, Wu Wei used a pen to be tougher than "Ma Xia", and the mountain body was smudged with a large piece of ink, and the overall picture showed a kind of brushwork and ink-drenched beauty. Similar to the Yuan Dynasty painter Ni Zhan's freehand proposition of "yi brush grass, do not seek similarity".
Only as a painter of the academy, Wu Wei's wild and energetic painting style was attacked by later generations of literati, and the Zhejiang school led by him was called the "evil school" by later generations of calligraphy and painting critics. But in any case, his pursuit of the majestic temperament of painting and his breakthrough contribution to the painting of the Ming Dynasty courtyard body cannot be erased.
Under the influence of the Zhejiang School, the painting language tended to be more coarse brush and ink, and the painting style won with upright and bold, which was popular in the Ming Dynasty painting world for hundreds of years, until the "Wumen School" headed by Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming rose and declared decline, and gradually withdrew from the historical stage.
epilogue:
People's livelihood is the foundation, from the painting of people's livelihood, we can more easily and intuitively understand the life of that era, the country is rich and the people are strong, only when the stomach is full can we be attached to the elegant style. It is also the stable life that makes their travels come to life on the paper and appreciate the beauty of nature.
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