Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Zhao Fu
Southern Song landscape painter from Zhenjiang, whose ink handscroll Ten Thousand Li of the Yangzi is in the Palace Museum
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 Zhao Fu (variant character)
Zhao Fu, whose name is also written with a variant character, came from Jingkou, today's Zhenjiang in Jiangsu, and painted landscapes and rocks in the Southern Song; in the Shaoxing era he lived on Beigu Hill in Zhenjiang. He often signed only 'Fu', so his paintings were long mistaken for Mi Fu's. His only surviving work, the ink-on-paper handscroll Ten Thousand Li of the Yangzi in the Palace Museum, Beijing, runs over nine metres and follows the river from Sichuan to the lower Yangzi, its waves outlined in pale ink and built up in washes after the manner of Li Tang. It carries Ming colophons by Qian Weishan, Zhang Ning and others and is recorded in the first Shiqu baoji catalogue.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; active in the Shaoxing era of the Southern Song (1131-1162)