White Chrysanthemums

Wang Zhen began his career in Shanghai as an apprentice, mounting ink paintings on silk. Painting had been a hobby, but at 39 he retired and returned to the rural county where he was from, and began painting full time under the name “Man of the White Dragon Mountains.” Five years later, he became a student of the painter Wu Changshuo and gradually adopted the teacher’s broad and simple style of painting. The inscription of this depiction of white chrysanthemums reads: Master Tao (Yuanming) [a famous recluse and poet famous for planting chrysanthemums outside his house] was from a military lineage. After surviving the hardships of icy frost, he conjured an image of chrysanthemums as “snow lions ready to do battle with the west wind.” During mid-winter of 1929, painted by “White Dragon Mountain Man.”