Appreciating Qian Xuan’s Eight Flower Painting Through The Postscript Written By Zhao Mengfu

This paper is mainly about the pursuit of historical background,artistic characteristics.painting techniques and Qian Xuan’s personal life according to the postscript written by Zhao Mengfu.who is Qian Xuan’s teacher as well as friend,for Qian Xuan’s painting-eight flower painting.Though the postscript has only 82 words, it includes a lot of information that Zhao Mengfu appreciates Qian Xuan’s works.All of these are deserved being analysis.The difference of artistic characteristics between former dynasty and Qian Xuan’s era, the change of his mental activity, thoughts and aesthetics because of the special political environment is discussed.The eight flower painting’s form is long paper.which draws 8 common flowers in Jiangnan region like hitom, pear, plum blossom, osmanthus and so on from left to right.But the flowers draw by Qian Xuan is already different from The courtyard painting’s style in Song dynasty.Qian Xuan is the first one to create literati flower-and-bird painting pioneer in Yuan dynasty.Yuan dynasty is a key period in the evolution of the flower-and-bird painting creation.Large number of literati and artists appeared due to the unique political environment. The purport is mainly about expressing emotions about escaping the mundane life. Qian Xuan is one of them.What he proposed in the painting reflected literati temperament.He emphasized lifelikeness instead of shapelikeness deliberately pursued in the former dynasty. As one of the most influenced artists in the early Yuan dynasty,Zhao Mengfu, was very demanding for appreciating paintings. However,we can know Zhao Mengfu appreciate eight flower paintings very much through the drawing communication between Zhao Mengfu and Qian Xuan.More interestingly,through Zhao Mengfu’s postscript, we can know Qian Xuan is addicted to drinking alcohol,even cannot draw without drinking alcohol later.All of these are good for us to know a drawer’s calm and confident mental state who is living in troubled times but doesn’t struggle all over the world.Moreover, we can realize his reasons of changing his creating idea and aesthetic taste better.This paper aims to collect related materials to appreciate the artistic characteristics of, to know the life style of Qian Xuan and his influences on flower-and-bird painting nowadays mostly using Zhao Mengfu’s point of view in his postscripts for reference.