@mastersthesis {6637,
	title = {The Landscape Paintings of the Ming Artist Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-Fu},
	year = {1981},
	school = {Kansas},
	abstract = {Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu (1483-1544), whose original ming was Shun, was an artist, poet, and calligrapher of the middle Ming period. Among his works of art are paintings of flowers old trees, rocks and plants, landscapes, and occasionally birds in natural settings. His poems often describe these same subjects and many appear on his paintings in a congenial union of the literary and visual arts. As a flower painter, Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu{\textquoteright}s influence was substantial and is recognized widely; however, his excellence as a landscape painter and the numerous extant examples of this subject matter from his hand are not well known.
Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu{\textquoteright}s landscape paintings are the primary material upon which this study is based. The paintings are analyzed from the points of view of technique, style, and authenticity. The artist{\textquoteright}s inscriptions and poetry appearing on the paintings as well as attached colophons provide a major source of information. Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu{\textquoteright}s memorial biography (mu-chih ming) and evaluations of him in traditional Chinese art criticism are among other resources employed to reconstruct events in the artist{\textquoteright}s life, his philosophy of art, and the stylistic development of his painting.
The first chapters examine Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu{\textquoteright}s background, his relationship with Wen Cheng-ming and Shen Chou, and the nature of his early work. The next three chapters analyze Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu{\textquoteright}s involvement with the Mi style of landscape painting. Deriving from the Sung dynasty literati Mi Fei and Mi Yu-jen, this style utilized ink washes combined with layers of horizontal tien or dots to describe a misty environment filled with conical mountains and small trees. Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu assimilated and creatively interpreted the Mi style, one of the most fascinating, but, in the Ming, neglected of the historical styles. It is not generally known that Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu identified strongly with the work of Mi Yu-jen due to special circumstances within his family and that perhaps he saw himself as a distant spiritual descendant of the Mi. This unique story, a major discovery of the investigation, is detailed in the several chapters devoted to the Mi style.
Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu also preserved a philosophy of art that was rare in the sixteenth century. He was a champion of the unorthodox and the expressionistic in landscape. His sixteenth century critics describe his art with terms like i-p{\textquoteright}in (untrammeled), mo-hsi (ink play), and hsieh-i (idea writing). Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu{\textquoteright}s insistence on spontaneity and self-expression in his landscapes is an important issue in this study. He is recognized as the beginning of a pattern of unorthodoxy, a very important stream of painting that continues in the work of Hsu Wei (1521-1593) and Chu Ta (b. 1625-d. after 1705). Thus, this study acknowledges the contributions Ch{\textquoteright}en Tao-fu made to Chinese landscape painting and presents for the first time a number of the artist{\textquoteright}s important works.},
	author = {McIntire, Letha}
}
