Figures from Chinese History: Yan Guang

Description

This album leaf is one of four from a series in the UMMA collections painted by Huang Shen. A skilled figure painter, Huang works in this series with swift, dynamic brush strokes that resemble calligraphy. His mastery of both painting and calligraphy, as well as poetry, is honored by his traditional epithet as one of the "Eight Eccentric Painters of Yangzhou" (a city in southern China). Each of the four album leaves in this series pictorializes an anecdote associated with a famous person in Chinese history. Each page includes an extensive inscription, signature, and two seals of the artist.
During his youth the well-known hermit-scholar Yan Guang (37 BCE–43 CE) was a close friend of Liu Xiu (6 BCE–57 CE), who later led a successful military campaign and became the founder of the Later Han dynasty (25–220). Missing his old friend, the new ruler sent a messenger to search for Yan Guang, who reluctantly traveled to the capital. Because he did not want to take advantage of his friendship with the emperor, Yan soon returned to his hometown, where he spent the remainder of his life fishing and farming.