Quiet Life in a Wooded Glen 林麓幽居圖
Wang Meng (Chinese, c. 1308-1385)
Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), dated 1361
- Medium
- Hanging scroll; ink and light colors on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 177.8 × 64.2 cm (70 × 25 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- China
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Asia
- Credit line
- Kate S. Buckingham Endowment Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This modest cottage nestled at the foot of towering mountains presents a quintessential image of academic retreat from the “dusty” world of material concerns and political instabilities. Its cultured occupant kneels on a platform and plays the zither (qin); a book lies open before him and young servants wait attentively nearby. The luxuriant setting of layered peaks and intertwined trees, as well as the dry, charcoal- like treatment of fibrous and dotted boulders, is imbued with a textural richness. This style is closely associated with Wang Meng, the last of the “Four Great Masters” of the Yuan dynasty.
Such a complex, kinetic composition reflects this artist's distinctive contribution to the literati's new use of painting as a vehicle for intellectual and emotional self-expression. This concept was largely kindled by social and political upheavals that accompanied the 14th-century Mongol conquest of China and the establishment of the Yuan dynasty. Wang Meng, who had served the Mongol government as a legal scribe, retired to a mountain hermitage in the turbulent final decades of Yuan rule. He may have executed this painting as a metaphorical self-portrait.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
