Ruan Xiu Walking with Wine in the Mountains

Wearing a loose robe, a recluse walks at leisure in the breeze on a mountain trail. In his right hand he holds a long staff with strings of coins and fruits, and in his left hand he carries a green-patinaed bronze wine pot. These details suggest that this figure is Ruan Xiu (270–311), an idiosyncratic hermit famed for his unrestrained personality and lofty spirit. Although short of money, Ruan is addicted to drinking alcohol and always hangs a few strings of coins on his staff to buy wine at any time on outings. The life of this legendary figure echoes that of many talented scholars who were driven to reclusion and poverty by social upheavals during dynastic change.
 

Living in the chaotic mid-seventeenth century, Chen Hongshou was an eccentric artist known for his figure paintings of the strange and the ironic, set in a peculiar landscape in forms never created by nature. Chen studied different styles of ancient figure painting and was once selected to paint the emperor’s portraits at court. Chen’s archaistic representation of figures was tied to the pictorial conventions of printmaking that illustrate dramatic, emotionally charged moments in a story. His paintings often animated the characters—renowned hermits and immortals—with emphatic gestures and poses, complementing their expressive body language with exaggerated facial features.