Seven ancient painters

First, Gu Kaizhi. Gu Kaizhi was born in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. He is the “painting ancestor” of Chinese painting and the first person in the history of painting. He pioneered the long scroll of traditional Chinese painting, and his Ode to the Goddess of Luo can be said to be the earliest preserved work in the world.

Gu Kaizhi

The original “Ode to the Goddess of Luo” is composed of several storylines like comic book and integrated long volume, but now lost, but later generations have traced it out, and now mainly in the Song Dynasty copy of the most similar, this volume of work 27.1 cm in length, 572 cm across, is the best preserved, but also the closest to the original one.

Second, Wu Daozi. Wu Daozi is a sage in our country, he is a “painting sage”, which shows that his painting technique has reached the peak of pioneering. He created the basic paradigm of white painting, landscape painting and folk painting, which are the three branches of Chinese painting. It can be said that Wu Daozi is the master of these three kinds of painting.

Send son heavenly king diagram

Wu Daozi’s representative works are “Sending son Tianking”, “Golden Bridge”, “Hell phase” and so on, according to the market in 2023, if it is a Wu Daozi genuine landscape painting, then the starting price will not be less than 100 million US dollars.

Third, Wang Wei. Wang Wei is a great poet. The famous sentences that our younger generation learned, such as “the red bean grows in the South” and “think twice about one’s relatives during festivals”, were all written by this great teacher. You can imagine how incomprehensible he is in literature and art.

Wang Wei

Wang Wei, who was also a painter, was called “the founder of literati painting” by later generations. He turned Chinese painting into an advanced course combining the three art forms of poetry, painting and calligraphy, which is the unique realm of “painting in poetry and poetry in painting”.

Fourth, Jing Hao. He was a famous painter in the late Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, and also the grandfather of the northern landscape painting school. He personally wrote “Bi Method Record”, which is a classic theory work of landscape painting, the main content of the painting of Qi, rhyme, scenery, thinking, brush, ink “six essentials”. His painting works “Kuang Lu” “snow landscape” and so on.

Kuang Lu Map

The painting, 185.8 cm in length and 106.8 cm across, is now in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

Fifth, Li Tang. Born in the Southern Song Dynasty, he sold paintings all his life, he won the first place in the temple examination, and later became the leader of the Southern Song painting Academy, “Myriad Pines and Wind” is one of his representative works.

Together with Guo Xi’s “Early Spring Picture” and Fan Kuan’s “River and Mountain Travel Map”, it is called “the three masterpieces of Song Dynasty painting”. It adopts the method of vista landscape and highlight local landscape, which opens an unprecedented history for the expression of concise painting.

A map of endless gullies and pines

Sixth, Zhao Mengche « The painter of the late Song Dynasty and the early Yuan Dynasty, he can be said to be a particularly powerful artist.

In calligraphy, he created the “Zhao style”, and the status of Ouyang Xun, Yan Zhenqing, Liu Gongquan called “regular script four masters”; In painting, he emphasized the “same origin of calligraphy and painting”, advocated the reform of the system style of the painting academy of the Southern Song Dynasty, created a new painting style of the Yuan Dynasty, and was the leader of the Yuan Dynasty painting circle, known as the “Yuan Ren Crown”, and his representative works such as “Songxue Zhai Anthology”.

Ni Zan

Seventh, Ni Zan. The painter of Yuan Dynasty, together with Huang Gongwang, Wang Meng and Wu Zhen, was called the “four families of Yuan”. His works have been called “elegant” since ancient times. He escaped the secular, but also unworldly, so once became the model of literati painting.

Of course, painters in history are more than this, for example, Zhu Dasha is a great master!