WU LI

born 1632, Ch'ang-shu, Kiangsu Province, China died 1718 Pinyin Wu Li Chinese painter who, although a convert to Roman Catholicism and later a priest, is remembered as being of the orthodox school of literati painting (wen-jen-hua) in the early Ch'ing period. Wu Li became a convert to Catholicism and in 1681 went to Macao Island (on the southeast coast of China), where, without family obligations after the deaths of his mother and wife and the marriage of his two daughters, he entered the Jesuit order. In 1688 he was ordained as a priest under the name Acunha and was posted as a missionary in Kiangsu. While Wu Li saw Western prints and paintings, his own paintings were entirely within the Chinese tradition (and are always signed with his Chinese name). He studied under the great painter Wang Shih-min and was a good friend of the painters Wang Hui and Wang Chien. Wu Li led a rather retiring life and cultivated the proper Confucian virtues in a manner appropriate to the ideal of the cultivated amateur of the literati tradition.