Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Chou Ying
Ming painter who began as a lacquerer, trained under Zhou Chen and copied old masters in collectors' homes, the only one of the Four Ming Masters without a scholar's education
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 Shifu · Hao Shizhou
Qiu Ying, courtesy name Shifu, styled Shizhou, came from Taicang and moved to Suzhou; he started out as a lacquer worker and learned painting from Zhou Chen. Unlike the scholar-painters around him he wrote little and usually signed his pictures with just his name, but he was a superb copyist, and long stays in the houses of collectors such as Xiang Yuanbian and Chen Guan gave him access to many Song and Yuan masterpieces, which he reproduced almost indistinguishably. He handled landscapes, figures and architecture with equal care and excelled in the blue-and-green manner and in fine-line paintings of palace women, as in Spring Morning in the Han Palace; his version of Along the River at Qingming, with the streets of Ming Suzhou in place of Kaifeng, also survives. Wen Zhengming often inscribed his paintings, and later critics grouped him with Shen Zhou, Wen and Tang Yin as the Four Masters of the Ming.
Life and times
Dates c. 1494 CE–c. 1552 CE