Ming-Qing Paintings Inscribed with Du Fu’s Poetic Lines

Abstract

Ming-Qing painters who engaged in the increasingly widespread practice of inscribing lines from Tang and Song poems on their paintings were especially drawn to Du Fu. It was not only Du Fu’s fame but also the intrinsic qualities of his lines that appealed to and challenged the artists as they rendered Du Fu’s couplets in a different medium. This chapter looks at the interaction between the new paintings and old poetic lines that the artists themselves added to their paintings, focusing on two albums of Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts by the seventeenth-century painters Wang Shimin and Shitao. The styles of these two artists diverge sharply, but so too do the ways they adapted their paintings to Du Fu’s lines. Their creative and divergent representations of the Tang poet’s lines may be viewed as another component of Du Fu’s legacy. It is one that, to be sure, lies outside of literary history but is very much a part of aesthetics and cultural history.