Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Xian Yushu
Yuan calligrapher from Yuyang whose cursive script Zhao Mengfu, his friend and fellow student of calligraphy, admitted he could never match
A desk holds an unrolled sheet bearing three bold black ink strokes, with a rack of many brushes above it, a stone ink slab and ink stick, a porcelain bowl, a red lacquer box, a dish of red seal paste and a paperweight; a small seated figure shows through a round window onto bamboo.
Also known as Zi Boji · Hao Kunxue Shanmin · Hao Zhiji Laoren
Xianyu Shu, courtesy name Boji, styled himself the Hermit of Hard Study and came from Yuyang, near present-day Tianjin, though his family had roots in Dexing under the Jin. In the Zhiyuan reign he served as a clerk in the Zhedong pacification office and later in the Southern Censorate at Yangzhou, before settling by the West Lake at Hangzhou in a studio he called the Hall of Hard Study. He learned calligraphy from Zhang Tianxi and wrote a bold, sweeping cursive; people paired him with Zhao Mengfu, and his scroll of Han Yu's Song of the Stone Drums is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his last years he was an archivist in the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, and he died in 1302, leaving the notebook Kunxuezhai zalu. Zhao Mengfu wrote that they had studied cursive together, but that Xianyu was far ahead and he could never catch up.
Life and times
Dates 1246 CE–1302 CE