Researches On Qiu Ying’s "Refined Gathering-themed" Paintings

As a special theme in Chinese painting history, refined gathering has enriched the contents of creation of the painters in all ages,.and meanwhile come down as a cultural phenomenon. Qiu Ying, a member of "the Four Drawing Masters of Soochow in Ming Dynasty", copied many works of the famous painters in Tang and Song dynasties all his life. After permeating the outstanding famous painters’ traditional techniques into his own artistic talents, he created lots of different themes and styles of works. He was especially good at landscape and figure paintings. Modern famous painter Liu Haisu appraised Qiu Ying’s paintings, "Portrait of a Beauty, a work of his, is beautiful in colors, brush stroke as thin as hair; the landscape paintings of green and gold colors, carefully constructed, have the charm of insipidity, moist and tenderness; the figures in his freehand brushwork paintings, however, are rakish and fluent, full of old artistic conceptions". Many among the painting works created by him all his life are themed on refined gathering. Therefore, to research Qiu Ying’s refined gathering-themed paintings is conducive to understanding the features of his painting art from another perspective. By taking Qiu Ying’s Picture of Antique Appreciation in Bamboo Garden for example, this paper makes a concrete exploration of the style characteristics of his refined gathering-based drawings, to excavate the literati’s refined pleasure hidden in his drawings. The research contents mainly include the following three aspects:firstly, understand the origin of the refined gather theme in Chinese traditional paintings; secondly, expound the creation style of refined gathering-themed paintings in Ming Dynasty; thirdly, discuss the artistic features of Qiu Ying’s refined gathering-themed paintings.