Landscape of the mind

For Chinese literati painters, nature provides a means of self-cultivation and a way of bonding, Zhao Xu reports.

'Your disciple's embarrassing brush and ink is not worthy of entering your collections," 17th-century Chinese painter Wang Hui told his teacher Wang Shimin (1592-1680) in the inscription on a painting he did in 1674, at the latter's request.

In fact, there were 12 of them, forming an album in which the younger painter tried his hand with a variety of landscapes, each realized with the signature style of a master painter from history.

If Wang Hui, well-established by that point, had genuinely felt any inadequacy, then all the old man could do was to disagree. In fact, he was so delighted by his student's work that in the autumn of the same year, he began his own 12 renditions of old masters. This was despite "my declining energy … and weakening eyesight", to quote from Wang Shimin's inscription at the end of his own album, the completion of which took him three years.

Despite their common surname, Wang Hui was not linked to Wang Shimin, a leading figure of the Chinese art scene at the time, by blood. Yet the two shared other, more important things: a love of history and a mutual devotion inspired by genuine appreciation.