Flowers, Rocks, Bamboo, and Landscapes Album

Gāo Fènghàn was born in Jiaozhou, Shandong Province. He developed an interest in poetry, painting, and seal-carving in his early youth, when he also began to collect old seals and inkstones. From 1729 to 1734, he served as an assistant magistrate in Shexian, Anhui Province, before a new assignment took him to Taizhou, where he stayed until 1737, when illness caused him to lose both his government position and the use of his right hand. He then retreated into a Buddhist monastery in Yangzhou, relearning how to write and paint with his left hand. He is sometimes grouped with Lǐ Shàn, whose work is also in the AMAM collection, among the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou” 揚州八怪.

This album, consisting of twelve landscapes and nature studies, was painted in 1733 while Gāo was still in Anhui. The leaves depict a wide variety of subjects, from landscapes and garden rocks to floral studies and bamboo. They demonstrate a broad range of techniques, from refined outline and color images executed with a brush, to spontaneous, impressionistic images painted with the artist’s fingers. Indeed, traces of the artist's fingerprints are evident in some of the black ink lines and dots. Finger painting was briefly in vogue among some of the eccentric Yangzhou artists and a few painters even grew long fingernails specifically to use in their art. Additionally, many of the leaves are further enhanced by elegant calligraphic inscriptions explaining the paintings’ content and styles.