Simple Retreat

Wang Meng’s Simple Retreat is a magnificent hanging scroll that depicts a tall, looming mountain landscape. First painted in ink and light colors on paper, as opposed to silk, Wang Meng’s Simple Retreat manages to fill the entire scenery with the density and frenzy of a late Yuan scholar’s expressive brushwork. Rather than an expansive vista of nature, Wang Meng paints a closely knit landscape of folded rocks, crested mountain peaks, gnarled trees, and cascading mountain streams. A small thatched cottage is the only hint of a human presence in this painting. The cottage is the scholar’s home, his sanctuary, where he can retreat from the turmoil of the outside world. Wang Meng renders the image of a secluded cottage extremely skillfully. He uses small, tight strokes to suggest the thatch of the roof and walls, as well as ox-hair texture strokes (niumao cun) and ink washes for the tree clusters and rocky mountainous landscape. The dynamic brushstrokes of Wang Meng’s Simple Retreat express a sense of frantic energy and confusion. Indeed, the turbulent movements of the mountains reflect the social and political chaos of fourteenth-century China, which saw the downfall of the Yuan dynasty and the rise of the Ming. The image of a domestic retreat, then, becomes a symbol of the scholar’s moral integrity and his renunciation of worldly power and pleasures.