Research On The Character Style Of Rangzhi Wu’s Seal Script Works

Rangzhi Wu (1799-1870), a famous calligrapher in Qing dynasty, was born in Yizheng of Jiangsu Province. He was an inner student of Shichen Bao and good at writing the seal script. It’s worth mentioning that Wu also had great attainments in Chinese painting, engraving Chinese stamps art and so on. However, it’s a pity that the document literatures about Wu’s works are so few that there are very poor specialized researches on his seal script works. Therefore, I hope it will be helpful to study Wu’s calligraphy through this dissertation’s research on the character style of his seal script works.This thesis is divided into three parts:the first part is a brief overview of Wu’s biography and his master-apprentice relationships with Shichen Bao and Shiru Deng; the second part focuses on designating stages of Wu’s seal character developments, and studies his calligraphy writing techniques and references for the form of Chinese characters on the stone tablets of Han dynasty during the mature period; the last part shows two seal script works from my graduate creations and makes a short discussion by combining with the previous analysis of Wu’s seal character works.