近代 傅抱石 杜甫小像 軸|Man in a Forest

Fu Baoshi

20th century · Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper · Asian Art

Fu Baoshi did not devote himself fully to painting until after 1939, when he settled in the wartime capital of Chongqing, Sichuan. There, poverty-stricken and struggling to support a growing family, he painted with a fierce determination to succeed. Often, he created images of himself in the guise of tragic historical figures who were not adequately appreciated during their lifetime. In this work, dating to the early 1940s, he depicts himself lost in a thick grove of trees and bamboo. His inscription quotes lines from a poem by Du Fu (712–770): Pity that the young pine trees cannot grow a thousand feet tall, So let the thicket of bamboo be cut down by the tens of thousands. (Wen Fong, trans., Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art [New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001], p. 121)

Artist

Fu Baoshi

Date

20th century

Medium

Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper

Culture

China

Department

Asian Art

Credit line

Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, in memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986