Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Wang Meng
Painter from Huzhou, a grandson of Zhao Mengfu, whose densely textured landscapes made him one of the Four Yuan Masters and who died in prison over the Hu Weiyong case
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 Shuming · Hao Huang He Shan Qiao
Wang Meng, courtesy name Shuming, styled the Woodcutter of Yellow Crane Mountain, came from Huzhou in Zhejiang; his father was Wang Guoqi and his mother a daughter of Zhao Mengfu. He held office briefly at the end of the Yuan, then withdrew for many years to Yellow Crane Mountain near Hangzhou, where he traded ideas about painting with Huang Gongwang and Ni Zan. Under the Ming he became prefect of Tai'an in Shandong, but because he had once gone with Guo Chuan and others to look at paintings in the house of the chief minister Hu Weiyong, he was arrested when Hu's case broke and died in prison in 1385. His landscapes are crowded with mountains, built up with twisting rope-like and ox-hair strokes and dry ink dots, as in Dwelling in Seclusion in the Qingbian Mountains of 1366, now in the Shanghai Museum. Ni Zan wrote that his brush could lift a tripod and that no one like him had appeared in five hundred years.
Life and times
Dates 1308 CE–1385 CE