Lan Ying

Lan Ying a Chinese landscape painter of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties (1585-1664) who was among the most prolific and versatile artists of his time. Working in the professional tradition of the Zhe school, he painted in a wide range of manners and handed on the craft to his son, and his long career bridged the art of the Ming and the early Qing.

Early Life and Formation

Lan Ying was born in 1585 in Hangzhou, in the province of Zhejiang, a city that had long been a centre of painting and of the luxury trades that supported it. He came from a modest background and trained as a professional painter rather than as a scholar-amateur, learning his craft through the workshop system that produced many of the finest decorative and figure painters of the period.

Hangzhou was the home of the Zhe school of painting, a tradition that traced its descent from the court painters of the Southern Song and that favoured the strongly brushed, immediately decorative manner of the great masters of the past. Lan Ying absorbed this heritage and added to it a wide study of the earlier landscape traditions, from the Tang and Song masters to the Yuan painters.

Unlike the scholar-painters who claimed that painting was a private pursuit of the educated gentleman, he worked openly as a professional, taking commissions and producing paintings for sale. His lifelong industry and his command of many styles made him one of the most successful artists of his generation, though the very versatility that brought him work was later held against him by critics who prized a single distinctive manner.

Career as a Professional Painter

Lan Ying's career spanned some six decades, from the late sixteenth century into the 1660s, and he produced an enormous number of paintings in that time. He worked for a broad clientele of merchants, officials and gentry, supplying hanging scrolls, album leaves and fans, and he occasionally received commissions of a more ambitious kind from wealthy patrons.

He was known for his ability to paint in the manner of many different earlier masters, and he often gave his works titles that named the tradition he was following, as was customary in Chinese painting. This practice, which connected his work to the authority of the past, allowed him to display both his learning and his technical range to an audience that valued connoisseurship.

His professional success supported a large family, and he trained his son Lan Meng, who became a painter in his own right and continued the family workshop. The transmission of the craft within the family was characteristic of the professional tradition, in which training passed from master to apprentice and from father to son rather than through the scholarly lineages of the literati.

Style and Range

Lan Ying's landscapes range from the monumental to the intimate, and he was equally at home with the dense, richly textured mountains of the Song tradition and with the sparer, more calligraphic forms of the Yuan and Ming. He used a vigorous brush, strong ink contrasts and a bold sense of composition, and his paintings are often enlivened by vivid passages of blue and green colour in the ancient manner.

He painted figures and flowers as well as landscapes, and his range extended to the decorative and the fantastic. At his best he shows a lively inventiveness and a firm control of design that make his paintings rewarding despite their conventional subject matter, and he could produce work of real power when a subject engaged his imagination.

Later critics of the orthodox school, who followed Dong Qichang in prizing the literati tradition, tended to dismiss him as a mere professional whose facility lacked depth. Modern scholars have taken a more sympathetic view, recognising in his best work a genuine artistic intelligence and seeing him as a bridge between the workshop traditions of the Ming and the painting of the early Qing.

Subjects and Patronage Themes

Much of Lan Ying's output consists of landscapes of the familiar Chinese themes: mountains and rivers, travellers in the wilderness, scholars in retreat, and the seasons of the year. These subjects answered the taste of his patrons, who valued paintings that evoked the classical ideal of withdrawal from the world of affairs into the tranquillity of nature.

He also painted the traditional themes of longevity and good fortune, such as the immortals, the peach of immortality and the birds and flowers that carried auspicious meanings. Such works were especially in demand for birthdays and other occasions of celebration, and they show the professional painter adapting his art to the social functions that painting served in late imperial China.

His paintings were collected in his own time and in later centuries, and many survive in museums and private collections. Their number and their variety make them valuable evidence for the history of taste, showing what a wide range of styles a single successful professional might command in order to satisfy the demands of different patrons.

Influence and Legacy

Lan Ying died in 1664, having worked almost to the end of his long life. He was one of the last great representatives of the Zhe school, whose fortunes declined as the orthodox literati manner spread through the painting world of the early Qing under the influence of Dong Qichang and his followers.

Through his son and his workshop he left a body of painting that kept alive the professional traditions of Hangzhou, and his works continued to be collected and copied. His career illustrates the importance of the professional painter in a period whose art history has often been written from the point of view of the scholar-amateurs.

He is remembered today as a prolific and accomplished landscapist whose long life connected the painting of the Ming with that of the early Qing. His versatility, once held against him, is now appreciated as evidence of the range and vitality of the professional tradition in Chinese painting.

See also

• Zhe school
• Chinese landscape painting
• Dong Qichang
• Ming dynasty painting