Cheng Jiaxuan (1565-1643) [Ming] character Mengyang, Songyuan, 偈庵, also known as Songyuan Old Man, Songyuan Daoren, 偈庵居士, 偈庵老人, 偈庵道人, Xiuning (now part of Anhui) people, yuju Jiading (now part of Shanghai). Cheng Jiazhuo is not only good at poetry and painting, but also has a more prominent talent in calligraphy and music, and the young man did not learn the sword, and then deliberately read books, which was extremely qian and humble. His poetry advocated the establishment of personality first, and then the establishment of poetry, and opposed the style of imitation of the seven sons before and after, and at that time it was called "a generation of suzerains" and "a great family in the late Ming Dynasty", and the collection of poems passed down from generation to generation was "Songyuanlang Taoji", "Couplet Cultivation Hall Collection", and "Songyuan Wei'an Collection".
Cheng Jiaxuan also works in landscapes, Zong Nizhan and Huang Gongwang, painting flowers quietly and idyllicly, winning with rhyme, dry brush and ink, and preferring leisure. He belonged to the Same Tiandu Sect with Li Yongchang and was also a pioneer of the Xin'an Sect, Wu Meicun called him "one of the Nine Friends in Painting", tongli Tang Shisheng and Lou insisted on being "Lianchuan Three Elders", and Li Liufang was a poetry and painting friend, and posterity called him "Mr. Jiading Four" together with Tang Shisheng, Lou Jian, and Li Liufang.
Cheng Jiaxuan did not create many works in his lifetime, and his heirloom works were even fewer. Most of his original works are landscape themes, simple landscapes depicted in fine brushstrokes, and sometimes lightly colored. One of the most representative is the landscape figure album he created in 1639 with a total of ten albums, in which the pen lines are strong but do not change, the nearby mountain stone lines are thick, and the pen and ink are rubbed on the paper, thus creating a sense of chiaroscuro that seems to be absent, and such a sense of chiaroscuro in the picture creates an illusion of mountain clouds and water vapor steaming.
Cheng Jiaxuan's landscape mainly inherits the tradition of literati painting in the Yuan Dynasty, and the painting style of Huang Gongwang and Ni Yunlin, especially Ni Yunlin, has the deepest influence on him. Throughout his landscape paintings, although he cannot get rid of the influence of the ancients, but at the same time he can exist in himself, his landscape painting works not only truly reproduce the true interest of nature, but also pour out the real subjective feelings, through the natural scenery to express the feelings of the literati, and gradually formed a painting style based on "simplicity" as the sect, showing his exquisite and skilled painting skills.
His pen and ink are strong and prominent at the same time without losing their weakness, and the pen is comfortable and elegant at the same time. Dong Qichang once said: "The nature of quality is light. From Cheng Jiaxuan's landscape paintings, his pursuit of nature, nature, and the work of not revealing axe chiseling is also a pursuit of "light", which makes people have a cheerful meaning, which shows his profound painting skills.