WANG HUI

born 1632, Ch'ang-shu, Kiangsu province, China died 1717 Pinyin Wang Hui probably the paramount member of the group of Chinese painters known as the Four Wangs (including Wang Shih-min, 1592-1680, Wang Chien, 1598-1677, and Wang Yan-ch'i, 1642-1715), who represented the so-called orthodox school of painting in the Ming and early Ch'ing periods. The orthodox school was based upon the dicta laid down by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636). It was "orthodox" in the Confucian sense of continuing traditional modes, and it was in contrast to a group of Individualists (especially Shih-t'ao and Chu Ta) who ultimately came to represent another development of the standards for the painter and his painting codified by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang. The Four Wangs were not all related. Wang Shih-min and Wang Chien were the teachers of Wang Hui. (Wang Yan-ch'i was the grandson of Wang Shih-min.) Wang Hui was taken into Wang Chien's household in 1651 and was there introduced to the leading scholar-painter of the day, Wang Shih-min, who had in turn been the disciple of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang. Thus Wang Hui enjoyed a broad and profound contact with both the theory and practice of what Tung Ch'i-ch'ang had taught and, according to the praise of both his teachers and contemporaries, excelled in painting. Wang Hui's fame reached the court in Peking, and in the period 1691-98 he was commissioned to supervise the production of a series of handscrolls commemorating the K'ang-hsi emperor's tour of the South. After that, however, he returned to the cultivated elegance of private life. Wang Hui, much like the other Wangs, primarily painted landscapes. Though much of his painting is academic and pedestrian, there is in his best works an intensity in the handling of brush-stroke rhythms and textures that yields a dense and detailed unity without any loss of either particular clarity or the general statement.