| Abstract | Ren Xiong (1823-1857) was a founding leader of the Shanghai School of Chinese painting, which consisted of a loosely knit group of artists centered in the Shanghai region. Ren produced a new mode of painting that satisfied the needs of the Shanghai's new social order, by combining aspects of the vernacular and elite traditions. The resulting hybrid appealed to a wide range of consumers, and introduced a new era of Chinese painting. Besides creating works that were of interest to a varied audience, Ren sought to market his paintings and prints in every way possible. He produced paintings to order from his home, sold paintings and single sheet woodblock prints through shops, drew illustrations for woodblock printed books, and worked as an artist-in-residence. Ren's adaptiveness is exemplified in his relationships with his two major patrons, Yao Xie and Zhou Xian. With the two major works he created for these men, the Album after Poems by Yao Xie and the Picture of the Thatched Cottage of Fan Lake, Ren demonstrated his sensitivity to the forces motivating the patrons' desire for the paintings, and tailored image and style to conform to those forces. So little work has been done on nineteenth-century Chinese art that there remains a need for an assemblage of the facts, which then can provide a framework on which to graft the more focused studies. In this dissertation I synthesize a background for the further study of Ren Xiong, and reproduce primary source material, much of which is inaccessible due to location. Having established a general understanding of Ren Xiong's life and works, I then examine two of the artist's greatest works in depth, to illuminate the respective artist-patron relationships out of which they grew. The study of these paintings and the circumstances surrounding their creation imparts to us some sense of the complex web of interrelationships tying together members of the Jiangnan cultural world during the second half of the nineteenth century. |
