Portrait of Zhu Yizun

Yu Zhiding, the painter of this intriguing portrait, was born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, and became widely known as the pre-eminent portraitist of his day. Yu imbued each of his portraits of eminent officials, scholars, poets, and artists with realistic faces, while also including subtle and oblique allusions that place them effectively within the larger social, economic, and cultural context. In this painting, Yu painted Zhu Yizun (1629-1709), a renowned scholar, official, poet, and bibliophile. The sitter, siting in a landscaped garden, looks out at us directly, with a confident, self-contained air, alerting us to his high status. Some influence from the Western approach to painting is visible in the use of shadow and color to model the face of the subject. The painting is also a perfect example of the convergence of Chinese artistic expression in bringing together the painted image, poetry and calligraphy by several renowned personages of the 17th-18th centuries.