Wang Mian

According to The New York Times, Wang Mian was one of the earliest artists to write poetry on their artworks. In addition, he was "one of the most distinguished practitioners of the reverse-saturation technique". In his lifetime, Wang penned an autobiography titled Mr Plum Blossom's Autobiography, in which he describes himself as "aloof and noble by temperament, hating to mix with the wealthy and powerful, and defending myself in bitterness and agony". After his death, Wang Mian became a "romantic, semilegendary figure". He is the protagonist of the eighteenth-century Chinese novel The Scholars by Wu Jingzi. In The Scholars, Wang's story is heavily dramatised, and his disillusionment with the private sector is attributed not to his failures at the examinations, but his realising "the empty vanity of officialdom". He is also anachronistically written to have become "an anonymous recluse in the mountains" shortly after the establishment of the Ming dynasty by Zhu Yuanzhang. Liu Shiru, who was also from Shaoxing and a respected painter in his own right who published his own plum painting manual, was said to have to have been "engrossed" with Wang Mian's works; he "practiced without eating or sleeping" to reach Wang's standards. Okada Hankō wrote a poem referencing Wang Mian to complement his 1838 painting Village Among Plum Trees. Wang's painting Prunus in Moonlight was displayed at the June 1985 Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery. The New York Times commented that the moon and the flowering plum tree in Prunus in Moonlight "play out the kind of male-female, mind-body, moon-earth drama that is not unfamiliar in 20th-century Western art, particularly after Surrealism", going further to compare Wang with Caspar David Friedrich. In his 1976 book Hills Beyond a River, James Cahill exalts Wang Mian as the "most famous of Yuan plum painters". However, art historian Maggie Bickford labels Wang Mian's art as "plain" and "ambitious" in her 1997 book Ink Plum.