Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Xiao Yi obtaining the Lanting Manuscript by trickery
Traditionally attributed to Qian Xuan 錢選 (late 13th century)
16th century
- Medium
- Ink and color on paper
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- H x W (image): 24.6 x 77.1 cm (9 11/16 x 30 3/8 in)
- Culture
- Chinese
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Charles Lang Freer
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), 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 Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Wen Zhengming was a painter, calligrapher, and scholar of the Ming dynasty. As a calligrapher, Wen Zhengming excelled in all the major scripts but most often practiced semicursive script, following the style of the master calligrapher, Wang Xizhi. Wang Xizhi (ca. 303-361) composed and wrote the Preface of the Lanting Gathering while with a number of eminent scholars and poets who drank wine as they worked along a winding brook surrounded by bamboo groves and mountains. The Preface became the most practiced and influential single piece of work in the entire history of calligraphy. Wen Zhengming wrote this version of the Preface when he was 84 years old, exactly 1200 years after Wang Xizhi had written the original composition.
