Shitao

Shitao the standard romanised form of the name of Zhu Ruoji (1642-1707), the Chinese painter and monk of the early Qing dynasty who is usually known in Western scholarship as Shitao. A descendant of the Ming imperial house, he became one of the most original landscape painters and theorists in the history of Chinese art, and his treatise on the philosophy of the single stroke remains a classic of artistic thought.

Name, Ancestry and Early Years

Shitao was born Zhu Ruoji in 1642, a member of the imperial Zhu family whose dynasty had ruled China since 1368. His descent from the founder of the Ming gave him a noble ancestry and, after the Manchu conquest of 1644, a dangerous one. When the dynasty fell he was an infant, and the tradition of his family holds that he was saved by a loyal servant who carried him from the doomed household and hid him in a monastery.

He was received into the Buddhist order as a child and given the religious name Shi Tao, from which the romanisation Shitao derives. He would use many other names in the course of his life, as was common among Chinese artists and monks, but it is Shitao that has become established in the literature of art history, and by which his paintings and writings are catalogued and studied.

His education in the monastery gave him a thorough grounding in the classics, in poetry and in calligraphy, and he showed an early talent for painting. The double burden of his imperial ancestry and his monastic vocation shaped a personality at once proud and guarded, and it gave his art a depth of feeling that his contemporaries recognised at once.

Travel, Study and the Natural World

During his years as a monk Shitao travelled extensively through the mountains and waterways of central and southern China. He saw the great ranges and rivers of the empire at first hand, and he came to believe that the direct experience of nature was the true source of a painter's art, more important than the copying of old models in the studio.

He studied the works of the past masters closely and mastered their techniques, but he refused to treat any of them as the final authority. In his view the painter should learn from the ancients as a means of freeing his own powers, not as a way of reproducing their effects, and this conviction set him against the dominant orthodox teaching of his day.

His travels brought him into contact with the scholarly and artistic circles of the lower Yangzi and later of Beijing, where he met poets, collectors and other painters. These encounters widened his reputation, and by the end of the seventeenth century he was recognised as one of the most gifted and independent artists of the age.

Painting and the Single Stroke

Shitao's painting is remarkable for the vitality of its brushwork. He used ink with great freedom, in strokes that vary from the faintest wash to the densest black, and he built his landscapes out of rhythmic movements of the brush rather than by the careful accumulation of carefully modelled forms. His rocks, trees, water and figures possess an animated, almost calligraphic life.

The theory that underlies this practice is set out in his short treatise, often rendered as the Sayings on Painting, or the Discourse on the Method of Painting. Its central idea is that of the single stroke, the primal mark out of which all representation grows, and which is grounded not in any external model but in the painter's own nature and in the order of the universe. From it, he held, all method and all form proceed.

He rejected the idea that the painter should simply follow the methods laid down by the ancient masters. Each artist, he argued, must find the method within himself, responding to the subject and to his own spirit, and only in this way can painting remain alive. This doctrine made him the great advocate of originality in the Chinese tradition.

Later Life and the Yangzhou Circle

In the last decades of his life Shitao settled at Yangzhou, the prosperous commercial city on the Grand Canal, where he lived as a layman and supported himself by painting. He had drifted away from the strict observance of the monastic rule and lived with a family of his own, and the move to Yangzhou placed him at the centre of a lively market for paintings.

He sold his work to merchants, officials and fellow artists, and he wrote letters to patrons about commissions, prices and the difficulty of pleasing a public whose taste was often more conventional than his own. The business of painting occupied much of his time, and his surviving correspondence is a valuable record of the working life of a great artist in the early Qing.

Yangzhou became the home of the Eight Eccentrics and of a whole culture of artistic individuality in the following generation. Shitao, who died in the city around 1707, was regarded by these later painters as a founding figure, the master who had shown that a painter could be both professional and fiercely original.

Reputation and Legacy

Shitao's reputation has never stood higher than in modern times. His paintings are prized as masterpieces of the expressive tradition, and his treatise on the single stroke is read as one of the profoundest statements of artistic philosophy in any language. Scholars have studied him as a painter, a poet and a thinker, and exhibitions of his work have presented him to a wide international public.

His influence was felt throughout the later Chinese tradition, especially among the artists of Yangzhou and among those who resisted the rule of orthodoxy. The idea that the painter must discover his own method, rather than imitate the ancients, gave encouragement to every artist who sought to make an individual contribution.

Together with Bada Shanren he stands at the summit of early Qing painting. His fusion of imperial melancholy, monastic learning and professional practice produced an art of extraordinary range, and his conviction that the painter's own nature is the ground of true method remains one of the enduring insights of Chinese aesthetics.

See also

• Bada Shanren
• Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou
• Chinese painting theory
• Yangzhou