Study Of Garden Landscape Paintings

In the late Ming Dynasty, the construction of the ancient private gardens in China culminated both in the scale and quality, which especially manifested prominently in Suzhou. Painting of Wu School, famous one in our painting history, was established in Wuzhong area at that time. Garden art is a kind of compositive one, and the rise of garden art promoted the development of many other arts, including painting, poem, horticulture, literature and so on. The most direct embodiment was the appearance of a lot of garden landscape paintings at the theme of garden. These paintings directly displayed social customs, having much historical significance. This paper aims to research China’s garden landscape paintings exemplified by those paintings of Wu School. It summarizes the development of garden landscape paintings in different dynasties, and mainly discusses the contributions of Wu School of the Ming Dynasty in garden landscape paintings which are specifically explained by examples from early stage, peak stage and late stage of their development. The early foundations of Wu School were laid by a group of pioneers including Du Qiong, Wang Fu, Shen Zhenji, etc. After that a group of painters like Four Masters of Wu School inherited the essence of the pioneers, putting the garden landscape paintings to a new stage. Four Masters, the best painters of Wu School, are Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin and Qiu Ying, under whose influences China’s garden landscape paintings reached their peak time. To the late stage, the bright younger generations further developed the paintings, but these paintings were more like records rather than paying much attention to expressing inside feelings like former works. The prosperity of Wu School garden landscape paintings had many relations with politics, economy and thought in the Ming Dynasty. The painting works reflected humanism of the intellectual men of Wu School but also had their own limitations, which would be specifically discussed in the article. The paintings of Wu School showed some secular trends in the late time, but in general, the main content was about the idle life of intellectual men, manifesting these intellectual men’s refined and elegant life style. These paintings exerted many influences on all kinds of arts both in that time and future time.