LAN YING (1585-after 1664)

Lan Ying was a renowned professional painter from Qiantang in Zhejiang area, active during the late Ming to early Qing period. Accomplished in the landscape, bird and flower, and bamboo and rock genres, Lan Ying was most famous for his landscape paintings, often rendered in the blue-and-green style. He was sometimes classified by connoisseurs as a painter from the Zhe School, a school of Zhejiang-based painters active during the Ming dynasty who continued the lineage of the Southern Song school of academy painting pioneered by masters such as Ma Yuan and Xia Gui. Other connoisseurs contested such classification and placed him in the ranks of the Wulin School, a school of painters active in Hangzhou during the late Ming dynasty, who developed distinctive styles based on the literati paintings by Yuan masters such as Huang Gongwang. Lan Ying was a prolific painter who continued his painting pursuits through old age, and produced a considerable number of works throughout his long career.

The subject matter of rocks first appeared in Chinese literati painting around the Five Dynasties and Song periods. The Northern Song Emperor Huizong was particularly known for his veneration of rocks and an ink painting of a garden rock by Huizong with his colophon is preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing and illustrated in Emporor Huizong and Late Northern Song China, The politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, Patricai Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, editors, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2006, fig 11.3. Another painting by Lan Ying in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and illustrated in Wege ins Paradies, oder Die Liebe zum Stein in China, Herausgegeben von Albert Lutz and Alexandra von Przychowski, Museum Rietberg, Zunich, 1998, pl.25.

A painting of a Lingbi rock by Lan Ying is in the collection of Sichuan Provincial Museum, illustrated by David Ren, Classical Chinese Rocks, Beijing, 2002, fig. 42.