Mynah and Lotus 鷯哥荷花圖
Ren Yi (Chinese, 1840–1895)
Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1885
- Medium
- Hanging scroll; ink and colors on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 125.7 × 50.5 cm (49 1/4 × 19 7/8 in.)
- Culture
- China
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Asia
- Credit line
- Gift of Florence Ayscough and Harley Farnsworth MacNair
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Ren Yi was among the most successful and influential among Chinese painters of the so-called Shanghai School. Arriving in Shanghai in 1857, he took the artistic name “bonian” (one-hundred years), claiming that it would take him a century to achieve success. However, by 1875 Ren Yi was the best-known painter in Shanghai. His highly sought-after bird-and-flower paintings initially followed the Song dynasty (960–1279) convention of applying rich color fields within outlines, producing decorative patterning with lifelike representation. This work represents his mature, more spontaneous style that is characterized by looser brushwork, more ink washes, and greater tonal variation.
The mynah bird, known for its perfect imitation of the human voice, was a favorite subject of the influential 17th-century painter Zhu Da (Bada Shanren). Known for his highly individualistic style, Zhu Da was particularly influential among Shanghai painters. The black form of the mynah was ideal for the expressive brushwork known as xieyi (“sketch conceptualism”); and for Zhu Da, the mynah was imbued with a cryptic, highly personal symbolic power. It is unclear whether Ren Yi consciously accessed Zhu Da’s…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
