Zhao Mengfu
The reformer under the Mongols.
Zhao Mengfu was a descendant of the Song emperors but served the Yuan dynasty. He renewed painting and calligraphy by returning to older models.
Zhao Mengfu was born in 1254 in Huzhou in present-day Zhejiang province. He was an eleventh-generation descendant of the founder of the Song dynasty and grew up in a scholarly family. When he was in his early twenties the Mongols under Kublai Khan conquered the Southern Song, and the Chinese world in which he had grown up collapsed.
In 1286 he was summoned to the Mongol court in Dadu, present-day Beijing. He accepted, which many loyal Song scholars saw as a betrayal. He had a long career and eventually reached one of the highest posts in the Hanlin Academy. He himself seems to have felt torn, and he wrote of his longing for home in the south. He was married to Guan Daosheng, who was an admired painter and poet, known especially for her bamboo paintings.
In art Zhao Mengfu championed what he called “the spirit of antiquity”. He wanted to bypass the detailed style of the Song academy and draw inspiration from the Tang and early Song. His landscape Autumn Colours on the Qiao and Hua Mountains of 1295, in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, was painted for a friend who had never seen his family's ancestral region. The picture is simple, almost archaic, with calm forms and light colour. He also painted horses and sheep, and brought the brushstrokes of calligraphy to the fore in painting.
As a calligrapher he created an elegant, clear style that became a model for centuries and has influenced printed typefaces. His grandson Wang Meng became one of the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty. Zhao Mengfu is regarded as the artist who renewed Chinese painting after the Song and paved the way for the tradition of the scholar painters.