Ma Lin () (ca. 1180 – after 1256) was a Chinese

court painter A court painter was an artist who painted for the members of a royal or princely family, sometimes on a fixed salary and on an exclusive basis where the artist was not supposed to undertake other work. Painters were the most common, but the cour ...

during the

Song dynasty The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. The Song conquered the rest ...

active during the early to mid 13th century.Barnhart: Page 133. He was the son of the famous Chinese painter Ma Yuan, from whom he learned the art of painting. One of his best known paintings is ''Night Outing with Candles'', which depicts a gentleman sitting in the doorway of a pavilion, facing four pairs of tall candles amongst flowering crab apple trees. It illustrates a poem by the famous (dissident poet and artist) Su Shi: "My fear is that in the depths of night, the flowers will fall asleep and depart, so I light the tall candles to illuminate their red beauty.".Wang Yao-t'ing, ''Looking at Chinese Painting'', Nigensha Publishing Co. Ltd., Tokyo, Japan (first English edition 1996), p, 88. A full moon in the sky overhead confirms its nighttime setting.

Notes

References

* Barnhart, R. M. et al. (1997). Three thousand years of Chinese painting. New Haven, Yale University Press.

External links

Sung and Yuan paintings
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Ma Lin (see list of paintings) Year of death unknown Court painters Song dynasty landscape painters Artists from Hangzhou Year of birth unknown 12th-century Chinese painters 13th-century Chinese painters Painters from Zhejiang {{China-painter-stub