Figures in Settings Album

This album consists of fourteen leaves with various subjects from history, literature, and folklore, demonstrating the artist’s wide knowledge of literary culture. He presents a playful take on subjects that would have been very familiar to educated people of the period, but sometimes with an earthy irony that roots the elevated themes in naturalistic images of daily life. His inscription on the first leaf, Nymph of the Luo River (1997.29.14A), provides an introduction to the album as a whole.

Zhāng Hóng was a successful professional painter born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, a city known for wealth and cultural sophistication. Little is known about his life and career from historical sources, but what is known suggests that he was educated, and revered in the small circle of scholars and painters from Suzhou. His surviving paintings demonstrate that he was a very versatile artist. He could paint in the literati style for which the Suzhou area was famous, but also made realistic landscape paintings and depicted local life and folk scenes.