Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Xia Yong
Late Yuan painter of ruled-line architecture from Hangzhou, known for minute pavilion scenes inscribed with the full text in tiny script
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 Mingyuan
Xia Yong, courtesy name Mingyuan, came from Qiantang, now Hangzhou; he is absent from the painting histories, and his name and origin are known mainly from the inscriptions on his paintings. A master of ruled-line painting in the tradition of Wang Zhenpeng, he drew halls and pavilions in extremely fine ink lines and copied the full text of Fan Zhongyan's Record of Yueyang Tower or Su Zhe's Rhapsody on the Yellow Tower in tiny script in the open sky. His surviving works are small paintings on silk; versions of Yueyang Tower are in the Palace Museum and the Freer Gallery, which also holds his Yellow Tower.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; active c. mid-14th century, late Yuan