Viewing Plum Blossoms with Warm Wine 溫酒賞梅圖
Yuan Jiang (Chinese, active 1688–1746)
Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1717
- Medium
- Hanging scroll; ink and slight color on silk
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 165 × 99 cm (65 × 39 in.)
- Culture
- China
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Asia
- Credit line
- Gift of Naomi Donnelley
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Yuan Jiang is most renowned for his meticulous “ruled-line painting” (jiehua) of architecture—the only pictorial style to utilize carpentry tools along with the flexible brush. A master of composition as well as draftsmanship, Yuan seamlessly constructed buildings within landscapes of imposing grandeur and unexpected drama. This aristocratic villa and its surrounding garden of large, diagonally swept trees and huge, eroded rocks lies beneath distant mountain ranges that emerge and recede above a thick mist. Within this animated and dreamlike setting, figures in the foreground library, on the veranda, and in the surrounding garden appear isolated in their own tranquility. Such strikingly panoramic but personally accessible images were typically commissioned by affluent individuals of late imperial China for display in the spacious reception halls of their private mansions.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
