Flowers on River

by Zhu Da, Qing Dynasty, hand scroll

Ink on paper, 20.5 x 582 cm,

Tianjin Museum

Zhu Da (1626 - 1705) was a descendent of the Prince Ning of the previous dynasty overthrown by the Qing Dynasty. Once he was a Buddhist monk, he later became a Daoist priest under the name of Geshan, Renwu, Bada Shanren and many other style names. He was excelled in painting flowers and 1oirds in precise brushwork and exaggerated form, and desolate landscape. The stork under his brush often show white eyes to the viewer, suggesting the artist's disdainful attitude to the world affairs. His colophon looks like characters meaning laughing and crying, and he often

inscribes poems on his paintings to convey his pain over the fallen dynasty. Zhu Da, Yuan Ji, Hong Ren and Kun Can are known as the "four monk artists in the early Qing Dynasty".

The beginning of the scroll shows lotus flowers, some fully blown while others in buds, among leaves on a pool. The leaves were painted with a blunt brush saturated with ink in different shades that fully displayed the characteristic use of ink instead of colours in Chinese painting and the artist's consummate manipulation of ink and brushwork. The whole painting is impressively imposing and grandiose. A rare huge work of Zhu Da, it is in the collection of Tianjin Museum.