Chen Shu

Chinese painter

• Born: March 13, 1660
• Birthplace: Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, China
• Died: April 17, 1735
• Place of death: Beijing, China

An accomplished painter of landscapes and flowers, Chen Shu belongs among the elite of Qing Dynasty painters. Her conservative style appealed greatly to imperial society, and as an important teacher of male and female art students, Chen Shu established an artistic tradition that influenced future generations.

Early Life

Chen Shu (chehn shew) was born to an illustrious upper-class family in Jiaxing, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Shanghai, in the early years of the new Qing Dynasty. Her family traced its origins to the twelfth century, and her father, Chen Yao Xun, had gone to university. According to family legend, Chen’s artistic success was related to her father’s relationship with the god of literature. When her mother was pregnant with Chen, a monk told her father that the god had told him to ask Chen Yao Xun for money to restore his temple in town. Chen’s father agreed to pay, and just before Chen was born, he dreamed that the god visited his house. The baby was given the name Shu, which means “writing” or “book” in Chinese.

As a young girl, Chen was not sent to school along with her brothers. At seven, however, she began to ask them about their school readings, which she learned by heart. She also began to copy paintings and scrolls of calligraphy. Her traditional mother ordered her to stop these activities, which she saw as a distraction from her education as future housewife. Chen disobeyed her mother, copying one of the paintings in her father’s study, and was beaten for it by her mother. That night, the god of literature appeared to Chen’s mother in a dream and told that her daughter would become famous and must be allowed to study. The dream caused a change of heart in Chen’s mother, and she hired a tutor to instruct Chen in classical literature. In turn, Chen often painted literary scenes and decorated her bedroom with her work.

Chen’s father died when she was still a teen. She helped her bereaved family, selling the products of her sewing and teaching her younger brother classical literature.

Life’s Work

Chen Shu was fortunate to marry an unconventional man who appreciated her art and shared similar interests, supporting her work and professional development. Qian Long Guang, a teacher, was five years her elder and had recently been widowed. He, too, came from a respected family. Chen fully accepted her integration in his family and continued to honor his deceased first wife, attending her altar in the family home. She also received positive artistic feedback and support from her father-in-law, Qian Rui Cheng, an official and specialized painter of pines and rocks as well as a calligrapher, whose ill wife Chen helped to nurse.

Soon, Chen found herself in a vibrant artistic, literary, and intellectual circle, and her paintings were widely admired. Her home became the location of many artistic meetings, and the sale of her work helped to sustain her lifestyle in spite of her husband’s relatively low income. Indicative of Chen Shu and Qian Long Guang’s artistic collaboration is a series of undated landscape paintings by Chen, idealizing scenes on the Yangzi River, that are inscribed with the poems of her husband in the sky.

The birth of her five children also inspired Chen as a teacher. Her first son was born in 1683, when Chen was twenty-three years old; he died of smallpox in 1687. To save her second son, Qian Chen Qun (1686-1774), from this epidemic, Chen sent him to live with her mother-in-law for the next seven years. Chen bore two more sons, Qian Feng (1688-1718) and Qian Jie (1691-1758), and one daughter whose year of birth is unknown. In 1695, Chen’s husband went home to his ailing parents. Failing to find a satisfactory teacher, Chen decided to educate her four children herself, an unusual act concerning her boys.

While raising her children, Chen continued to paint. Her favorite subjects were flowers, landscapes, and figures. Artistically, Chen employed a conservative style and modeled her work on that of classical masters. Her orthodox style earned her the admiration of her society, which saw in her works a vigor generally deemed absent from the paintings of women who employed a more contemporary, decorative style.

Chen’s flower paintings drew inspiration from the Ming painters of the Wu School of Suzhou. Among Chen’s best surviving works in this genre are the ten leaves of the Sketches from Life (1713) album, held by the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, like much of her existing work. The brush strokes of the leaf Vegetables, Fruit, and Asters show an expressive yet also relaxed quality, and the colors are applied directly, without outlining in the so-called boneless style of the Wu School. Similarly, Iris and Roses shows long ink brushstrokes tracing the veins of the leaves and petals of the iris, whose colors are depicted in classical hues.

After her husband Qian and her third son Feng both died in 1718, when she was fifty-eight years old, Chen maintained a close relationship with Qian Chen Qun, who stayed home with her for the official two-year mourning period following Qian Long Guang’s death. When Qian Chen Qun returned to Beijing in 1721 and rose high in the imperial bureaucracy, he invited Chen to join him, and she stayed in Beijing from 1722 to 1725. This visit enlarged Chen’s artistic reputation and introduced her to the artistic life of the capital.

Eventually, however, Chen asked for leave to return to Jiaxing, where she would stay and work until 1735. Two of her most famous landscape paintings were created there in 1734. Imitating Tang Yin’s “Dwelling in the Summer Mountains” offers a vast view onto a pastoral southern Chinese river scene. On the left of the river, weeping willows are executed in exact strokes, along with shelter houses with open windows through which figures are seen and white rocks crowned by three pines rise against a summer sky. On the right, pine ridges traverse hills before distant mountains. It is a picture of serenity, created with formal rigor.

In 1735, her second son wanted to visit Chen in Jiaxing, but she traveled instead to see him in Beijing. The journey weakened the old artist, and she became ill. For the new year, Chen Shu may have created her last works, if her seals are authentic on the two hanging scrolls depicting a flower planter and a vase with flowers.

Chen Shu died on April 17, 1735. Her brother and the husband of her daughter were at her side as death ended a long, artistically productive and highly esteemed life.

Significance

Chen Shu’s flower, landscape, and figure paintings were valued by her contemporaries for their orthodoxy and mastery of classical conventions. Critics praised Chen for creating her art based on references to past masters. Her adherence to classical styles and rejection of fashionable, decorative techniques was interpreted at the time as displaying “masculine” virtues and eschewing “inferior, feminine” aesthetics.

Traditionally, part of Chen Shu’s artistic fame in China was based on her exemplary personal lifestyle. Exhibiting the desired virtues of model daughter, wife, and mother, her personal life contributed to her lasting artistic reputation, yet her paintings do not show any signs of subordination or compromise.

Her son Qian Chen Qun, who wrote a glowing biography of his mother, aided Chen’s reputation. As Qian rose at the imperial court, he made gifts of his mother’s paintings to the Qian Long emperor and his court. Thus, many of Chen’s works became part of the imperial collection. The emperor appreciated Chen Shu’s paintings so much that he adorned them with his own poetry. On Chen’s painting Imitating Wang Meng’s “Dwelling in the Mountains on a Summer Day,” Qian Long wrote poems five times, from 1782 to 1793, affixing his seal every time and filling most of the painting’s sky.

Chen Shu’s artistic impact reached beyond her immediate work. As a respected teacher of male and female art students, including prominent members of her family, she founded an artistic tradition of her own. Her youngest son, Qian Jie, and the famous Qing painter and art historian Zhang Geng both learned life sketching from Chen. Zhang’s Landscape After Wang Meng (1732) clearly reveals the depth of Chen’s influence upon his artistic development. Chen’s work, no less than her teaching, served to inspire future artists, such as when the court painter Chin Deng Biao created the album Imitating Chen Shu (no date). Chen’s poetry was collected but never printed, and it has been lost.

Bibliography

Barnhart, Richard, et al. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Standard introduction to the subject; places Chen’s artistic achievement into the context of China’s national art. Illustrated, notes, bibliography, index.

Sullivan, Michael. The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy. 2d rev. ed. New York: George Braziller, 1999. Sheds welcome light on the artistic practice of adorning paintings with poems written in calligraphy, as happened to Chen Shu’s works. Illustrated, bibliography.

Weidner, Marsha. “The Conventional Success of Ch’en Shu.” In Flowering in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, edited by Marsha Weidner. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. Thorough discussion of Chen’s life and work; reproduces many of her paintings. Uses Wade-Giles. The same book has a chapter on “Women Painters in Traditional China” by Ellen Johnston Laing, providing background for Chen’s life and art. Illustrated, notes, bibliography, glossary of Chinese names.

Weidner, Marsha, et al. Views from the Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists, 1300-1912. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988. Catalog of an American exhibition, contains primary and background information on Chen and places her in a larger tradition. Illustrated, notes, bibliography, index.