Luo Pin

Luo Pin a Chinese painter of the Qing dynasty (1733-1799), one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, best known for his portraits and for his eerie and original paintings of ghosts. The son of a family of craftsmen, he brought to the scholar's art a craftsman's precision and a haunting imagination, and he made portraiture a vehicle of psychological insight.

Early Life and Training

Luo Pin was born in 1733 in Shexian, in the province of Anhui, into a family of modest artisan background. His father was a woodblock carver and printer, and the family moved to Yangzhou, where the printing trade and the markets for art were thriving. He grew up in a world of skilled craftsmen, learning cutting, drawing and design from his earliest years.

He received a classical education and rose to the lower levels of the examination system, but he never achieved high office. He was by temperament independent and proud, and he supported himself by painting and by working in the world of printing and publishing. His craftsmanship gave him a precision of line and an interest in technique that distinguish his work.

His training in the artisan tradition meant that he approached painting as a skill to be mastered in all its branches, from figure drawing to portraiture to the design of printed images. This thorough grounding allowed him to move easily between the different kinds of work that his livelihood demanded, and it is the foundation of the technical assurance visible in all his painting.

Portraiture and the Study of Likeness

Luo Pin is regarded as one of the finest portrait painters of imperial China. He painted scholars, monks, ladies and officials, and he gave his subjects an unusual degree of life and individuality. His portraits are not formal commemorative images but studies of character, and he paid close attention to the face, the expression and the bearing of the sitter.

He was a careful student of the methods of portraiture and is known to have written on the art of catching a likeness. He travelled to see the works of earlier masters and to observe the faces of the people around him, and he developed a technique that combined accurate description with expressive freedom. His personal appearance was famous, and some of the most affecting images in his work are thought to be self-portraits.

His interest in the human face was connected to a broader interest in the human condition. A portrait by Luo Pin aims not merely to record features but to convey something of the inner life of the person portrayed, and this psychological ambition gives his portraiture a seriousness new in the Chinese tradition.

Ghosts, Figures and the Supernatural

Luo Pin is celebrated above all for his paintings of ghosts. He painted the strange and restless spirits of the Chinese imagination, and he did so without sentimentality, showing them as gaunt, tormented or melancholy creatures that are more pathetic than terrifying. His album of ghost paintings is one of the most original works of the eighteenth century and has fascinated viewers ever since.

The tradition offers various reasons for his obsession with the supernatural. One story holds that he painted ghosts because he could see them, another that he made them a commentary on the moral condition of the living. Whatever the truth, the pictures themselves are remarkable for their atmosphere and for the way they draw the viewer into a world of uneasy half-lights.

In addition to ghosts he painted Buddhist and Daoist figures, legendary characters and scenes from literature. His mastery of the human figure allowed him to give these supernatural beings a fleshly reality that makes them all the more disturbing, and his control of composition and of the expressive use of empty space is everywhere apparent.

The Art Market and Life in Yangzhou

Like the other artists of his circle, Luo Pin worked for the market of Yangzhou, then one of the wealthiest and most dynamic cities in China. He painted for merchants, officials and professionals, and he produced works for sale in the shops and studios of the city as well as commissioned pieces for individual patrons.

His connections with the world of printing and publishing also shaped his career, and he designed images for books and worked with the craftsmen of the trade. This immersion in the commercial culture of his time made him, like his fellows, a professional artist whose livelihood depended on his reputation and on the taste of his buyers.

The wealth of the Yangzhou salt merchants supported a whole generation of painters, and the Eight Eccentrics, of whom Luo Pin was one, were the most famous beneficiaries of this patronage. Their willingness to paint in personal and unconventional styles was made possible by a market that valued novelty and individuality, and Luo Pin's success is an example of this interplay between art and commerce.

Influence and Legacy

Luo Pin died in 1799, one of the last of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou. His portraits were admired by his contemporaries, and his ghost paintings became famous as examples of the imaginative reach of Chinese art. They have been reprinted and studied repeatedly in modern times.

His work is important for the history of Chinese portraiture, a genre that had often been the province of anonymous craftsmen but that Luo Pin practised as a personal art. His insistence on psychology and character in the painted likeness anticipated the concerns of later portraitists and gave the genre a new respectability.

He is remembered as one of the most haunting and original of Qing painters, an artist who combined technical mastery with a strange and personal imagination. His ghosts, in particular, remain among the most memorable images in the whole of Chinese painting, and they have given him a reputation that extends far beyond the specialist literature.

See also

• Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou
• Jin Nong
• Zheng Xie
• Chinese portraiture