Focus on this artwork and discuss the Description.
Ni Zan painted Six Gentlemen while visiting his friend, the art collector Lu Heng, in the spring of 1345. Ni’s inscription explains that he arrived by boat at Lu’s house on May 10, and that Lu immediately brought paper and asked him to paint something for him (a request he made whenever the two of them met). Though tired, Ni Zan obliged and produced the painting by the light of a lamp.The result was a sparse landscape in which six old trees stand on a small bank in the lower foreground, across an expanse of water from some distant hills in the background. Ni Zan’s inscription suggests that “old master Dachi”, the respected elder artist Huang Gongwang, would laugh when he saw the painting. It is accompanied by a second inscription by Huang himself, who was also a guest at Lu Heng’s house at the time, and examined the painting soon after it was made. It is from Huang’s inscription that the painting receives its name, Six Gentlemen:Another inscription, possibly by a different guest at Lu Heng’s house, volunteers its author as a model if Ni Zan should ever decide to add a fisherman to his painting later. The final inscription, added after Huang’s death, remarks that he and Ni Zan will live on in the form of the painting.
Ni Zan Huang Gongwang