Ming Loyalists Painter Research

Adherent artists of the Ming Dynasty" are those survivors of the overthrown Ming Dynasty who lived in the Qing Dynasty. They reminisced the overthrown Ming Dynasty and did not want to be controlled by the Qing Dynasty. Those artists made splendid artistic achievements in ancient Chinese painting. So far there have been quite a lot of researches on them. However most of the researches are only on those outstanding artists and their works, while the whole painting circle is neglected. The concept of "adherent artists of the Ming Dynasty" is often confusing, too.The paper first works out a unified standard of the conception of "adherent artists of the Ming Dynasty". A table is then made in which 143 artists and their brief biographies are introduced. Adherent artists of the Ming Dynasty had many names and alias. Many of them changed their names and alias to express their nostalgic memories of their mother dynasty.Adherents were very cautious to make friends. They were discreet in their speeches and behaviors, especially in making friend, to escape the literary inquisition in the Qing Dynasty. They chose reclusion as their life mode so that the chances of their public appearing could be reduced and their social relations could be simplified. But they did not cut themselves off from the outside world. There were some old family friends, some yearning for each other, some echoing each other with poems and scrolls. They communicated with one another in various ways. They took others as their models and refused to be officials. Circles of adherents were gradually formed. The famous "Three Adherents within the Country", " Three Hermits in Wuzhong", "Gui Qi Gu Guai", "Three Men in South of Five Ridges", " Eight Men in Jinling",etc. are all adherent circles famous at that time. There also existed numerous poem associations and gatherings of literati.Many of the adherent artists, in fact, enjoyed a higher fame in writing poems. Their poems were often collected into the poem collections famous at that time. An adherent nostalgia was apparently embodied in the poems. Some vocabularies and literary quotations were so frequently used that they have become fixed adherent vocabularies.The adherent age was the adherents' prosperous period of art producing. Their adherent tendency was first reflected in their choice of the themes. Some of the artists' ideal models in history occurred in their paintings. However, few adherent artists could express their admiration for the historical models directlyby their paintings. Some of the historical models that were mentioned frequently in the adherent artists poe IB neve occurred in the paintings, which shows that most of the adherent artists couldn't express their adherent nostalgia successfully only by paintings.The adherent artists' moral quality, knowledge, literary talent and their ideological building are no worse than the artists in any other dynasty. The adherent group brought the literary painting onto a new stage. But they attempted to compensate the deficiency in their paintings with their poems, as a result of which the beauty of the paintings were eclipsed and their paintings became more dependent on the poems. The adherent artists often made use of their poems to preserve history, by which a sound foundation of conveying history with poems was made. The Chinese paintings, at earlier ages, also emphasized the importance of conveying history and politics in the paintings. But the so-called realistic ideology in the adherent artists' paint was very obscure, which made their idea of conveying history with paintings very weak.The adherent artists adopted various and colorful styles in their works. That is the reason why the author has not used the term "the Ming Dynasty adherent artists' paint school". The art historians often used "intense emotion and exaggerating styles" to describe the Ming Dynasty adherent artists' works, which actually is far from summarizing the adherents' style as a whole. Regarding the part as the whole can only leads to a misunderstanding...