Anchorage on a Rainy Night
Artist:Shen Zhou (Chinese, 1427–1509)
Period:Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
Date:dated 1477
Culture:China
Medium:Hanging scroll; ink on paper
Dimensions:Image (painting): 31 1/2 × 13 1/4 in. (80 × 33.7cm) Overall with mounting: 84 × 19 3/4 in. (213.4 × 50.2 cm)Overall with knobs: 84 × 22 5/8 in. (213.4 × 57.5 cm) Image(colophon sheet): 12 × 13 1/4 in. (30.5 × 33.7 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill
Accession Number:L.2001.85.1
Not on view
Anchorage on a Rainy Night illustrates how Mingscholar-artists intertwined poetry and painting to create a vehiclefor intimate exchanges among a close-knit circle of friends.Radiating a mood of subdued introspection, the painting mirrorsShen's state of mind less than two months after his father's death,when he found solace in a friend's company. Shen drew on thepictorial vocabulary of the Yuan artist Huang Gongwang (1269–1354):softly contoured peaks, flat plateaus, and outcrops of roundboulders accented by dark foliage dots and a few foreground trees.But Shen simplified Huang's complex brush idiom to a few brushconventions and a narrow range of ink tonalities, and he reducedHuang's richly articulated compositional structure to a geometricscheme of repeated diagonals in which the wedge-shaped foreground,receding stream, echelon of successively taller trees, and distantmountain slope all point toward the upper right, where he added apoetic inscription that places his visual tone-poem incontext:
Sparse paulownia leaves bring drops of morning dew,
East of the ancient city in the rising sun's slantingrays,
Swallows fly low over the overflowing pond.
Thus I know that tonight the spring rain will beplentiful,
How fitting that fish should leap and ducks swim.
On the twentieth day of the last [lunar] month of spring inthe dingyou year [May 2, 1477], I lodged on a boatto
the east of the city with Weide. After the rain, everythinggrew quiet. I did this picture and poem to capture the mood.
In response to Shen's poem, his close friend Wu Kuan added apoem following the same rhyme scheme along with the observationthat the harbor Shen has described is none other than the onefronting a farmhouse owned by Wu's family.
沈周(1427-1509),字啟南,號(hào)石田,晚號(hào)白石翁,江蘇長洲人。雖經(jīng)薦舉,隱居不出。擅畫山水、花鳥,畫名甚大,自成風(fēng)格,形成“吳門派”,與文徵明、唐寅、仇英合稱“明四家”。詩宗白居易、陸游、蘇軾。沈周在元明以來文人畫領(lǐng)域有承前啟后的作用。他書法師黃庭堅(jiān),繪畫造詣?dòng)壬?,兼工山水、花鳥,也能畫人物,以山水和花鳥成就突出。在繪畫方法上,沈周早年承受家學(xué),兼師杜瓊。后來博取眾長,出入于宋元各家,主要繼承董源、巨然以及元四家黃公望、王蒙,吳鎮(zhèn)的水墨淺絳體系。又參以南宋李、劉、馬、夏勁健的筆墨,融會(huì)貫通,剛?cè)岵⒂?,形成粗筆水墨的新風(fēng)格,自成一家。沈周中年時(shí)成為畫壇領(lǐng)袖,技法嚴(yán)謹(jǐn)秀麗,用筆沉著穩(wěn)練,內(nèi)藏筋骨。晚年時(shí)性情開朗,筆墨粗簡(jiǎn)豪放,氣勢(shì)雄渾??v觀沈周之繪畫,技法全面,功力渾厚,在師宋元之法的基礎(chǔ)上有自己的創(chuàng)造,進(jìn)一步發(fā)展了文人水墨山水、花鳥畫的表現(xiàn)技法,被譽(yù)為吳門畫派之領(lǐng)袖。著有《石田集》、《客座新聞》等。
吳寬題跋。吳寬(1435-1504),字原博,號(hào)匏庵、玉亭主,明代名臣、詩人、散文家、書法家,世稱匏庵先生。直隸長州(今江蘇蘇州)人。成化八年進(jìn)士第一,狀元,會(huì)試、廷試皆第一,授修撰。侍講孝宗東宮。孝宗即位,遷左庶子,預(yù)修《憲宗實(shí)錄》,進(jìn)少詹事兼侍讀學(xué)士。官至禮部尚書。其詩深厚醲郁自成一家,著有《匏庵集》。善書,作書姿潤中時(shí)出奇崛,雖規(guī)模于蘇,而多所自得。
此作網(wǎng)傳名稱為《雨后幽寂圖》,不知出自何處。美國大都會(huì)藝術(shù)博物館官網(wǎng)以中文標(biāo)注此作名稱為“明沈周《夜雨泊舟圖》軸”。