Shi Tao

Shi Tao the courtesy and monastic name of the Chinese landscape painter and theorist Zhu Ruoji (1642-1707), one of the most original artists of the early Qing dynasty. A descendant of the Ming imperial family who became a Buddhist monk after the fall of the dynasty, he developed a personal and expressive style and set out his artistic ideas in a celebrated treatise on painting.

Early Life and the Fall of the Ming

Shi Tao was born in 1642, in the last years of the Ming dynasty, into a branch of the imperial Zhu family. His birth name was Zhu Ruoji, and he was descended from the founder of the dynasty through a younger son. The collapse of the Ming and the conquest of China by the Manchus in 1644 destroyed his family's world when he was still an infant, and he was carried away to safety by a loyal servant who became his protector.

His early years were spent in flight and in hiding, and while still a child he was placed in a Buddhist monastery, partly for safety and partly because the monastic life offered a refuge and an education to those who had lost their place in the world. He was ordained as a monk and took the religious name Shi Tao, by which he is chiefly known, along with a great many other names and styles he used in the course of his life.

The sorrow of the fallen dynasty and the experience of displacement marked his whole career. Though he lived under the Qing and in later life came to associate with the new order, the memory of his imperial ancestry gave his work and his temperament a restlessness and an intensity that he never wholly lost.

Wanderings and Artistic Formation

As a monk Shi Tao travelled widely, visiting the famous mountains and rivers of China, especially in the south. These journeys gave him the direct experience of nature that he regarded as the foundation of true painting, and he studied the scenery of the great ranges with an attention that went beyond the conventional imagery of the album and the scroll.

He studied the works of the earlier masters with great care, but he refused to make imitating them the aim of his art. He drew on the painters of the Yuan and the late Ming, and on the tradition of the scholar-amateur, while insisting that the painter must answer to the living landscape and to his own spirit rather than to the precedent of the past.

His early work shows the influence of the established manners of the day, but by the 1670s and 1680s he had developed a highly personal style. He made his way to the great cities of the lower Yangzi and to Beijing, where he met leading scholars, poets and painters, and he began to acquire a reputation for the brilliance and independence of his painting.

Style and the Theory of Painting

Shi Tao's landscapes are distinguished by their energy and by the freedom of their brushwork. His brush moves with a rhythmic force, now dense and dark, now light and sparse, and his compositions are often full of movement, with rocks, trees and watercress rendered in strokes that seem to be alive. He painted flowers, bamboo and figures as well as landscapes, and his calligraphy is equally distinctive.

His theory was as original as his practice. In his brief but famous treatise, known in English as the Sayings on Painting, he argued that the painter must attain the single stroke, the primitive mark from which all form proceeds, and that this stroke is rooted in the painter's own being and in the nature of things. Painting, for him, was neither imitation of the ancients nor mere description of the visible world.

He attacked the orthodox followers of the established masters for turning the study of the past into a mechanical exercise. His insistence that the artist must find his own method and answer to the spirit of the landscape made him a hero to later painters who valued individuality, and his treatise became one of the most quoted works in the literature of Chinese painting.

Later Life and Patronage

In his later years Shi Tao travelled to Yangzhou and to other cities of the lower Yangzi, where he lived as a professional painter and sold his work to a growing circle of admirers. He gradually withdrew from the strict discipline of the monastic life, and near the end of his life he adopted a lay style of dress and living, settling in Yangzhou, then a prosperous centre of commerce and of art.

He depended for his livelihood on the sale of paintings to merchants, officials and fellow artists, and his letters and colophons give a vivid picture of the dealings of a professional painter in the early Qing. He was sometimes disappointed by the prices his work fetched and by the taste of the market, but he found patrons who appreciated the originality of his manner.

Yangzhou was becoming the home of a vigorous commercial culture of painting, and the artists who gathered there in the eighteenth century, known as the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, looked back to Shi Tao as a forerunner. His independence and his willingness to please a private clientele while preserving his own style set a pattern that later professional artists followed.

Influence and Legacy

Shi Tao died around 1707, leaving behind a large body of painting, calligraphy and writing. His art was admired in his own day and continued to be studied and imitated, above all by the painters of Yangzhou and by the more individualistic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

His theoretical writings influenced the whole later tradition. The idea that the painter must possess the single stroke as the root of his art, and that the method of painting grows from the painter's own nature, became a touchstone for artists and critics who resisted the dominance of the orthodox lineage and its emphasis on copying the ancients.

In the modern era he has been celebrated as one of the greatest of all Chinese painters, an artist whose freedom and emotional power are felt even by viewers far from the traditions in which he worked. He is remembered together with his younger contemporary Bada Shanren as the supreme master of the expressive style of the early Qing.

See also

• Bada Shanren
• Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou
• Chinese landscape painting
• Zhu Ruoji