Hua Yan line painting scroll of beautiful women

[Hua Yan Painting of Beautiful Women in Line Drawing]

Painting of Beautiful Women in Line Drawing axis, Qing Dynasty, Hua Yan painting, silk, ink brush, 82 cm vertical, 32.2 cm horizontal
Signature: “Lin Ting Hua Yan.” The next seal is “Hua Yan”
This picture shows a dignified and frail woman, with her head lowered and her eyes lowered, and her hands covered with sleeves, sitting sideways on the Fuji Xiuta. The maid is rushing forward with a letter in her hand. This is a small landscape figure painting, without complicated plots and profound creative ideas, but focuses on displaying the beauty of women’s external image. The composition is ingenious. The upper part of the painting is not smeared with a single stroke of calligraphy and painting, and the characters and titles are placed in the lower part. A large area of blank space is located above the characters, which expands the space above the characters, and at the same time enriches the picture with the artistic conception of “silence is better than sound”. In addition, the emptiness of the upper part without pen and ink also coincides with the concise style of the fine line drawing characters, which helps to highlight the main characters. The woman in the picture has a sharp jaw and a melon face. Her face is beautiful and beautiful, and her thin eyebrows and long eyes are full of melancholy. The neck is long and the shoulders slide down, presenting a “fragile” posture, reflecting the aesthetic orientation of “morbid beauty” of the literati painters in the middle of the Qing Dynasty who pursued “beauty with a nail” in the paintings of beautiful women
Hua Yan’s figure paintings generally have three styles. In the early patriarchal clan system, Li Gonglin of the Song Dynasty, the style of painting is rigorous and the modeling is accurate and realistic. After middle age, following the Ming Dynasty’s Chen Hongshou and his biographies, the characters have become deformed and pay attention to the decorative effect of the picture. In his later years, he learned from many experts and formed his own style of writing with both shape and spirit, realistic and lasting appeal. This picture should be the representative of her early paintings of beautiful women.