Storing Garments of the Husband in Far Away Territory

In 1524, Guo Xu rejected an official post and the opportunity to work as a painter-in-attendance at the imperial court in Beijing.  Instead, he followed a wandering artist’s life and practiced a style of painting outside the conventions of the contemporary Zhe and Wu Schools (as illustrated by the style of the paintings to your right on this wall).  For this reason, he is counted today among the nonconformist painters of the early to middle Ming period (1378–1644).  Like other painters identified with this so-called Wild and Heterodox School, Guo Xu cultivated an aura of eccentricity, choosing the penname “Pure and Wild”.

The asymmetry of this painting—in which the dramatically cropped tree at the right balances the figures, basket, and pole used for airing the clothes in the foreground—is a familiar Zhe School compositional device.  The boldness and spontaneity of the brushwork of the women’s hairstyles, cheeks, and garment folds, however, offended late-Ming and Qing critics of this style.  They argued that artists such as Guo Xu had “not the slightest affiliation with correct traditions, merely recklessly smearing and rubbing away….”

A Late Ming biographer notes that Guo Xu worked simultaneously in painting and poetry.  The text on this scroll describes how the devoted wife feels close to her traveling husband when touching the garments he has left behind (see translation of the inscription at the right).  The sophisticated combination of evocative image and bitter-sweet text—and the similarity between bravura brushwork in the imagery and assured calligraphy of the poem at the upper left—confirm the artist’s artistic and literary ease.