Wen Tong

Who was Wen Tong?

Wen Tong was a Northern Song painter born in Sichuan famous for his ink bamboo paintings. He was one of the paragons of "scholar's painting", which idealised spontaneity and painting without financial reward.

He could hold two brushes in one hand and paint two different distanced bamboos simultaneously. He did not need to see the bamboo while he painted them because he had seen a lot of them. One Chinese idiom in relation to him goes "there are whole bamboos in his heart", meaning that one has a well-thought-out plan in his mind.

As did many artists of his era, Wen Tong also wrote poetry. As attested in his poems, he had at least one golden-hair monkey and a number of pet gibbons, whose graceful brachiation he admired. An elegy written by him upon the death of one his gibbons has been preserved in the collection of his works.