Wen Tong () (1019–1079)Barnhart, Page 373. Wen Tong's style name was Yuke (与可) with several sobriquets: Jinjiang Daren(锦江道人), Xiaoxiao Jushi (笑笑居士), and Shishi Xiansheng (石室先生) was a Northern Song painter born in

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

Ci hai, Page 1533. famous for his ink bamboo paintings. He was one of the paragons of "scholar's painting" (shi ren hua), which idealised spontaneity and painting without financial reward. He could hold two brushes in one hand and paint two different distanced bamboos simultaneously. One Chinese idiom in relation to him goes "there are whole bamboos in his heart" (胸有成竹), meaning that one has a well-thought-out plan in his mind. As did many artists of his era, Wen Tong also wrote poetry. As attested in his poems, he had at least one golden-hair monkey (金丝狨) and a number of pet

gibbon Gibbons () are apes in the family Hylobatidae (). The family historically contained one genus, but now is split into four extant genera and 20 species. Gibbons live in subtropical and tropical rainforest from eastern Bangladesh to Northeast India ...

s, whose graceful

brachiation Brachiation (from "brachium", Latin for "arm"), or arm swinging, is a form of arboreal locomotion in which primates swing from tree limb to tree limb using only their arms. During brachiation, the body is alternately supported under each forelimb ...

he admired. An elegy written by him upon the death of one of his gibbons has been preserved in the collection of his works.

Robert van Gulik Robert Hans van Gulik (, 9 August 1910 – 24 September 1967) was a Dutch orientalist, diplomat, musician (of the guqin), and writer, best known for the Judge Dee historical mysteries, the protagonist of which he borrowed from the 18th-century ...

, ''The gibbon in China. An essay in Chinese animal lore''. E.J. Brill, Leiden, Holland. (1967). Pages 77-79. The book includes the original text of Wen Tong's elegy and van Gulik's translation.

Notes

References

*Chaves, Jonathan . Cave of the Immortals: The Poetry and Prose of Bamboo Painter Wen Tong . Warren CT: Floating World Editions, 2017 . *Barnhart, R. M. et al. (1997). Three thousand years of Chinese painting. New Haven, Yale University Press. *Ci hai bian ji wei yuan hui (辞海编辑委员会）. Ci hai （辞海）. Shanghai: Shanghai ci shu chu ban she （上海辞书出版社）, 1979. Song dynasty poets Song dynasty painters 1019 births 1079 deaths Writers from Mianyang Song dynasty calligraphers Poets from Sichuan 11th-century Chinese poets 11th-century Chinese painters Painters from Sichuan 11th-century Chinese calligraphers {{China-poet-stub