The Garden of Solitary Delight

The painting attributed to Qiu Ying, one of the “four great Ming masters”, depicts the popular theme of a scholar in a bamboo grove, also called “the garden of solitary delight”. The central figure of a scholar rests in a bamboo alcove on a rock at the painting’s centre, while servants are engaged in a bustle of activity – completing parts of the garden, tending vegetables or carrying various objects, e.g. painting utensils or a qin zither. The ink painting is delicately colored and the technique, too, is close to Qiu Ying’s style. Apocryphal inscriptions by the other three “great Ming masters” – Shen Zhou (1427–1509), Tang Yin (1470–1523) and Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) are mounted in the rear part of the handscroll.