Landscape

Wen Jia was the second son of Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), one of the founders of the Wu School in the city of Suzhou. Following the Wen family heritage of classical literary study and painting connoisseurship, Wen Jia wrote books on art and eventually established himself as a painter of note.

In this landscape well-defined, swirling clouds separate the shoreline in the foreground from the cluster of background hills. The trees in the foreground, accentuated by the picturesque pine, are a standard eye-catching arrangement in many 16th-century landscapes produced by the Wu School followers of Wen Zhengming. The firmly executed dotted and textured outlines of Wen Jia’s forms and the cohesive structure of the elements, especially in the hills, also derive from this tradition of amateur scholar painting.

But there is special interest in the foreground, where Wen Jia has inserted the figure of a scholar, with a deer, fungus, and crane—all motifs which signify longevity. This painting may celebrate the unnamed individual in the scroll, and it may have been painted to commemorate a long forgotten meeting of like-minded gentlemen of letters and the arts.