Works by Shitao

Shitao, a Buddhist monk born into the Ming imperial clan, painted landscapes in washes and bold, loose strokes, and wrote in 1686 that he followed neither the Southern nor the Northern school, only his own method.

As Zhu Ruoji he was a small child when rebellion and Manchu invasion toppled the Ming in 1644, and by 1651 at the latest he had become the monk Yuanji Shitao. He went from Wuchang to Anhui in the 1660s, lived in Nanjing and Yangzhou in the 1680s, and moved to Beijing in 1690 seeking a patron. Finding none, he turned to Daoism in 1693, took the name Da Dizi, and went back to Yangzhou, where he died in 1707.

He drew on older painters such as Ni Zan but broke with them. In his writings he traced all his painting to the single brushstroke, the primordial line. Empty paper is part of the picture: in Landscape with solitary figure, from the 1660s, one tiny man stands on a ridge between a twisted tree and a cliff under a blank sky. The cliffs of Thirty-six Peaks of Mount Huang Recollected, of about 1705, are built from short wet dabs of ink.

Writing can claim a large share of the sheet: in Landscape Painted on the Double Ninth Festival it fills the upper part above misty peaks. He had been to the Qinhuai River in the 1680s, but whether his album Reminiscences of Qinhuai River shows real places is unknown; one leaf floats a roofed hall over mist and pines. Nearly everything below is landscape, with a few pictures of plants; most dated works come from the 1690s on.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art.