Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Wang Yi
Late Yuan portrait painter from Muzhou living in Hangzhou, author of a treatise on portraiture, whose Portrait of Yang Zhuxi has a setting added by Ni Zan
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 Sishan · Hao Chijuesheng
Wang Yi, courtesy name Sishan, came from Muzhou, today's Jiande in Zhejiang, and lived in Hangzhou, where he made his name as a portraitist in the last decades of the Yuan. He advised studying a sitter's expression unobtrusively while they talked and laughed, and his Secrets of Portraiture was preserved by Tao Zongyi in his Nancun chuogeng lu. His only surviving painting, the Portrait of Yang Zhuxi in the Palace Museum, Beijing, shows the Songjiang recluse Yang Qian in fine outline; Ni Zan added the pine and rock in 1363, and Yang Weizhen and other Yuan writers inscribed the scroll.
Life and times
Dates Born 1333; date of death unknown