Lan Ying
Chinese, 1585 - 1664
Chinese painter. Lan Ying spent most of his early life in Hangzhou (one of his hao names, Xihu Waishi, means ‘unofficial historian of West Lake’, referring to the city’s famous lake). He was classified by Chinese writers as the last of the professional painters working in the tradition of the Zhe school, a lineage that began with Dai Jin. Despite his professional status, Lan travelled widely and drew from masters of Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, such as Shen Zhou, and from the Huating (modern Songjiang in Shanghai Municipality) circle of painters, including such artists as Sun Kehong (1533–1611) and Chen Jiru, led by Dong Qichang.
Lan Ying is said to have shown great talent by the age of eight and to have produced a landscape of mountains, forests, rivers and clouds on the floor of a hall in his house with ashes from the family’s ancestral altar; he copied the works of painters of the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) periods and became proficient in fine-line architectural drawing (jiehua) and in painting palace ladies, a popular academic genre of previous periods (see China, §V, 3(vii)). He studied the work of the master Huang Gongwang of the Yuan period (1279–1368), and a series of landscapes in album format entitled After the Old Masters (1622; Taipei, N. Pal. Mus.), carries an inscription by Lan explaining that he had seen a Wang Wei painting in a Suzhou collection and a work by Zhao Lingrang owned by the Orthodox school master and theoretician Dong Qichang. This evidence hints at a new departure for Lan Ying and suggests that he ventured north from Hangzhou to learn at first hand from the innovative painters of the Huating region. The Songjiang practice of imitating (fang) the styles of old masters appears in a series of albums and handscrolls by Lan Ying. He drew from a wider range of models than most of Dong Qichang’s followers, attempting to combine the strengths of the Hangzhou school of professional painters and the styles of academic masters such as Li Tang and Ma Yuan with the concerns and principles of the ‘Southern school’ painters as defined by Dong Qichang (see China, §V, 5).
An early Qing-period (1644–1911) compilation of artists’ biographies, the third supplement to Xia Wenyan’s Tuhui baojian (‘Precious mirror for examining painting’; 1365), states that Lan Ying was an excellent painter of bamboo and rocks (see fig.), plum and orchids. The literati with whom Lan associated praised his works in the style of Huang Gongwang, but most evaluations of Lan Ying’s skill stress his ability to duplicate the brush manner of his models. The literati usually valued paintings that expressed the noble qualities of the artist or captured the ‘spirit’ (qi) of the model rather than the precise brushwork of a past master. Despite his technical skill and his enthusiastic adoption of the ideals of the Huating circle, Lan opened himself to charges that, according to the influential Chen Jiru, he retained the mannerisms of the academic style favoured at the imperial painting academy.
Lan Ying’s early works, exemplified by Listening to a Waterfall in a Pavilion in Spring (1622; hanging scroll, Shenyang, Liaoning Prov. Mus.), show the influence of Song period painting. The composition of Listening to a Waterfall and of a later work, Lofty Autumn among the Peaks of Mount Hua in the Manner of Guan Tong (1652; Shanghai Mus.), are typical of Lan Ying: a tall central mountain, reminiscent of landscapes of the Northern Song period (960–1126), towers above a series of smaller built-up peaks and ridges that begins in a middle-ground valley among a V-shaped arrangement of trees, cliff-side houses and cascading streams. An inscription on Listening to a Waterfall states that it imitates the style of Li Cheng, and the naturalism—the stippling that gives both texture and shading to earth surfaces, a convincing recession of space, an impression of cool mist and flowing water—is a close imitation of the Song manner. In the later Lofty Autumn, the artist’s concern has shifted from the convincing representation of mass and depth to the arrangement of several heavily outlined shapes given equal weight in the composition. Lan Ying relies less on tonal contrasts and varied geology for effect. Instead, the flat-topped central peak seems to push forward almost as if on the same plane as the foreground. Although rather static and conventional, there is enough of a distinctive touch in Lofty Autumn to raise it above the hackneyed or merely decorative efforts associated with professional painting.
After the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, Lan Ying’s contact with the literati ceased. Joint works with portrait painters such as Xie Bin (1568–1650), for which he provided landscape settings, and much routine, repetitive painting date from this period. Lan, however, was a prolific painter, given to painting compositions for large hanging scrolls on silk (a format to which his strong, stable compositions were suited) that could be used for a decorative purpose.
Vyvyan Brunst and James Cahill. "Lan Ying." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T049220 (accessed May 8, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
Chinese, 1558 - 1639
