Shen Quan

His works became influential in Japanese Edo period art.

Training under Hu Mei is recorded. Kumashiro Yūhi is recorded as having studied under Shen Quan. The recorded working language is Chinese. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are bird-and-flower. Work by Shen Quan is recorded in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art and The Palace Museum.

Shen was born in Deqing in Zhejiang province. He specialized in bird-and-flower painting, and was influenced by Bian Jingzhao and Lü Ji. His works were painted in a very realistic style, and he had many students and patrons. Shen was invited to Japan by a high official. He arrived in Nagasaki in the final month of 1731 with two students, acquiring many Japanese students after his arrival. His paintings soon became very popular, and after his 1733 return to China he continued to send paintings back to Japan. Shen had many pupils while in Japan; his most important was Kumashiro Yūhi, who in turn taught Sō Shiseki and Kakutei. Other artists influenced by Shen included Katsushika Hokusai, Maruyama Ōkyo, and Ganku. Shen's paintings were popular for their realistic, colored images of animals and flowers, and three-dimensional trees and rocks.

The painting style of Shen Nanping and his school would therefore be fruit of an artistic investigation. In their paintings, flora and fauna are not just “realistic”, but are styled just as they appear in Chinese and European treatises. Chinese and Western treatises on natural sciences could have played a key role in the spread of knowledge on subjects such as botany, zoology, and mineralogy, and that the images featured in these treatises might have inspired artists to choose and create new representations of bird-and-flower. That is why scholar Meccarelli has called the style of the Shen Nanping school “flora and fauna decorative painting”.

* • Illustration — Pair of Hares and Plum Blossom in the Snow, 1716 — • Illustration — Pair of Phoenixes in the Morning Glow, 1735 — • Illustration — Pine, Plum and Cranes, 1759