Tang Yin (6 March 1470 – 2 December 1523), courtesy name Bohu , Small Character Zi Wei , No. 6 Ru JuShi , Peach Blossom Master , Lu Guo Tang Sheng , Fugitive Zen Immortal Official, etc.
Born in Wu County, Suzhou Prefecture (present-day Wu Xiangfang, Gusu District, Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province), his ancestral home was Jinchang County, Liangzhou (present-day Suzhou District, Jiuquan City, Gansu Province), and was a famous painter, calligrapher and poet of the Ming Dynasty. He died on December 2, 1523, at the age of fifty-four.
Tang Yin was one of the "Four Houses of Ming" or "Four Houses of Wumen" in the Ming Dynasty, namely the four painters of the "Wumen School" of the Ming Dynasty, Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin, and Qiu Ying, known as the "Four Families of Ming". From the second year of Xuande in the Ming Dynasty (1427 AD), that is, the birth of Shen Zhou, to the thirty-eighth year of Ming Jiajing (1559 AD), that is, the year of Wen Zhengming's death, a total of one hundred and thirty-three years is the life era of the "Four Families of Wumen".
He is also one of the four great talents in Jiangnan, namely Zhu Yunming, Wen Zhengming, Zhou Wenbin, and Tang Yin.
Zhou Wenbin here appears as one of the four great talents of Jiangnan in today's film and television dramas or on the stage, but there is no clear record of Zhou Wenbin in the history books. This is a fiction that posterity needs to invent according to the needs of the play. It turns out that there is no Zhou Wenbin in history.
According to historical records, the first three people of Tang, Zhu, Wen, and Zhou Zhong did have their own people in history, while Zhou Wenbin was later fictionalized by the literati. The "four sons of Wuzhong" in history refer to Tang, Zhu, Wen, Xu, Xu is Xu Zhenqing, Xu is a Ming Dynasty literary scholar, and Li Mengyang and others are ranked as the "first seven sons", whose poetic style is clear, but they do not understand calligraphy and painting, and their personalities are different from the other three. Probably for this reason, later the literati fabricated a beautiful Zhou Wenbin to make up a number.
According to historians, one of the real four talents in history should be Xu Zhenqing.
Xu Zhenqing (1479-1511), also known as Changguo. A native of Meili Town, Changshu, he later moved to Wu County (present-day Suzhou). Ming Dynasty writer. Together with Tang Bohu, Zhu Zhishan, and Wen Zhengming, they were called the "Four Talents of Jiangnan" (also known as the Four Talents of Wuzhong). He is praised for the absolute sentence of "article Jiang Zuo jia jia jade, smoke moon Yangzhou tree tree flower".
1) Tang Yin learned art - from a famous teacher
At first, Tang Yin was introduced by Zhu Zhishan to worship Shen Tianshi as a teacher, but Shen Tianshi recommended Zhou Chen (号, Dongcun), because Shen thought that Zhou Dongcun was good at painting characters, which was more suitable for Tang Yin, and from then on, Tang Yin also taught Shen and Tuesday, and obtained the essence of their painting skills, and also had the opportunity to observe the ancient paintings collected by the two of them.
Tang Yin initially admired the imitation of Song Dynasty paintings, and later admired the paintings of the Wang Wei school of the Tang Dynasty, which were outlined in ink and rendered with green and green, and there were paintings in poetry, and poetry in painting was the highest realm of painting art. So he devoted himself to attacking the Wangpai paintings, and his paintings, later even his teacher Zhou Dongcun lamented himself, and unabashedly said that "only a few thousand books of Tang Sheng" was the biggest praise for his students.
2) The disaster of innocence - caught in a criminal case
During the reign of Ming Hongzhi (1488-1505 AD), Tang Yin won the first place in the township examination of Tianfu (present-day Nanjing) - Xie Yuan. The following year, he went to the meeting with Xu Jing, a jiangyin man, because Xu Jing cheated in the examination room, because he went with his fellow countrymen, Tang Yin was also implicated, it was really a fire at the city gate that hit the pond fish, ate a wrongful lawsuit, and suffered a wrongful injustice, which stimulated him greatly. Since then, he has fallen into disgrace, and his personality has become arrogant and uninhibited, and his life has been decadent.
Because of the lack of hope in the examination, he devoted himself to painting, and he wrote in one poem:
The first place in the imperial capital,
Rampant return to the old Mao Heng.
Standing cone mo smile no room,
Wanli jiangshan pen was born.
At that time, he felt that his fame was hopeless, and there was no place for him to stand in the official field, but he still promised that he could also draw thousands of miles under his pen.
Later, his life was also embarrassed to sell paintings for a living, and another poem also reflected his helplessness:
Aoyama white-haired old idiot stubborn,
Pen Yan's career is hard to eat.
The people of the paddy fields on the lake do not want,
Who's going to buy me to paint Zhongshan.
At this time, Tang Yin's life had reached a considerable level of poverty. He once wrote to his friend Wen Zhengming, saying that he recalled that when he entered the Beijing Conference at that time, "the secretary of state made a request to fill in the streets and alleys", and after the scientific examination, it turned out that "Yin in the sea was a disdainful person" and "knew and did not know, and spit on it with all his fingers.". That is to say, before the exam, relatives and friends came to invite to send the exam, so it was not lively, after the scientific examination, they all thought that Tang Yin cheated on the exam, and the people who knew and did not know were pointing behind their backs and being spurned. In fact, he was wronged.
At this time, Tang Yin deeply felt the snobbery of feudal society and the difference between before and after. He often exudes this dissatisfaction in poetry and paintings, such as one of his poems in the "Autumn Wind Fan Diagram" has two sentences: "Please look at the world in detail, most of them are not hot and cold", that is, to use poetry and painting to satirize the shortcomings of the world.
3) The world is hot and cold – take refuge in Buddhism
Tang Yin was deeply impressed by the cold state of the world at that time, and in his later years he still converted to Buddhism, calling himself "Liu Ru Layman", and he also hated that his old mansion in Suzhou Wu Xiangfang's birthplace was too busy, so he moved to the Peach Blossom Nunnery in Taohuawu (now in the Taohuawu Camp Lane in Suzhou).
During the Ming Dynasty Apocalypse (1621-1627 AD), when someone built the "Zhun Ti Nunnery" here, a stele was found, which was hand-written stone carving by Tang Yin, the "master of the Peach Blossom Nunnery" in March of the eighteenth year of Hongzhi (1505 AD), and this stone inscription is inscribed with a cloud of the seven ancient poems "Peach Blossom Anthem":
Peach Blossom Wood In Peach Blossom An,
Peach blossom fairy in the peach blossom temple.
Peach blossom immortals plant peach trees,
And folded the branches as wine money.
Wine wakes up only sitting in front of the flowers,
Drunk and must spend sleep.
Day after day after flowering,
Drunk and sober year after year.
Unwilling to bow before the carriage,
May the old dead flower wine room.
Car dust horse foot noble fun,
The fate of the poor with the branches of the wine cup.
If you compare the rich to the poor,
One on the flat earth and one in the sky.
If you compare the poor to the poor,
He had to drive me to idleness.
The world laughs at my madness,
I laugh at the world can't see through it.
Remember the Tomb of The Five Tombs,
No wine and no flowers hoe for the field.
This poem is an overview of Tang Yin's description of his life's thoughts and personalities, writing that he did not meet his talents, the world was cold, he saw through the world's riches and poor, and finally used the ancient scroll green lantern and the Buddha as a companion, borrowing wine to pour sorrow.
4) Tang Bohu dots autumn incense - absurd fabrication
Throughout Tang Yin's life, there was no affair. However, since Feng Menglong wrote "Tang Xieyuan's Smile and Marriage", Tang Bohu's novels and operas of Qiu Xiang have been very popular, in fact, these are all made up by novelists and operas. According to the "Suzhou Fu Zhi", this is explained: "The novel has Tang Xieyuan's tricky marriage to Qiu Xiangshi, a maid of the Hua family, who is a Jiangyin Jidao person, not Tang Bohu."
Some people have also made a study: Hua Xueshi (Hongshan) became a jinshi in the fifth year of Jiajing (1526 AD), at this time Tang Bohu had died three years ago. According to the calculation of age, Hua Xueshi was twenty-seven years younger than Tang Bohu, and Tang Bohu only lived to be fifty-four years old, so Tang Bohu had absolutely no possibility of selling himself to the Hua family.
Some novelists and opera composers portray a painter who despises the powerful, does not tend to be inflamed, and has talent, as such a ridiculous and lustful person, and there is no evidence, and there have always been people who have embraced Tang Yin.
5) Poor life - success and fame
Tang Yin, poetry, calligraphy and painting, all work. He has also traveled to famous mountains and rivers, and his footprints have spread throughout Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Gansu and other provinces, which has also achieved the realistic spirit of his paintings. Zhu Zhishan once said that he "painted the sun and moon, mountains and rivers, Xiaohan, wind, smoke and clouds, fog and rain, flowers and birds, chivalrous people, beautiful women, etc., all of which are exaggerated and abrupt." It can be seen that the subject matter of his paintings is extensive. He is best at landscapes, and he is also good at characters, ladies. His painting style is a fusion of the strengths of various schools and a self-contained style.
Tang Yin's painting art has achieved outstanding achievements, and the word "Tang Painting" has become a painting term, just like the "Wang Character" in calligraphy, which has become a standard and has been patriarchal by later generations of painters. Tang Yin is the most famous among the "Four Ming Families" and is recognized as "elegant in pen, blue out of blue".
Tang Yin was a master painter of the Ming Dynasty, and his representative works include Wind and Wood Diagram and Mengshu Palace Diagram are now in the collection of the Palace Museum. And other works such as "Sunset Lonely Crane Diagram", "Apricot Blossom Hut Diagram", "Spring Mountain Companion Diagram", "Autumn Wind Fan Diagram", "Liuru Jushi Complete Collection" and so on. He has composed more than 300 poems. The picture below is "Wind and Wood Diagram"
Some of the pictures come from the Internet, invaded and deleted.
Original/2021-11-01 - Optimistic tasteless