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Huichong
Early Northern Song monk poet and painter, one of the Nine Monks, famed for small river scenes that Su Shi inscribed.
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 Monk Huichong · One of the Nine Monks of early Song
Huichong was a Buddhist monk of the early Northern Song, traditionally said to come from Jianyang in Fujian, and one of the 'Nine Monks' poets. He excelled at five-character regulated verse on small natural scenes, and still more as a painter: Guo Ruoxu's Record of Paintings praises his geese, egrets and especially his small scenes of cold shoals and distant banks, a genre later called 'Huichong's small scenes'. His painting 'Spring River at Dusk' prompted Su Shi's quatrains of 1085, with the famous line about ducks first sensing the warming water.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown (by one account 965–1017); active around the reign of Song Zhenzong