8 Ren Yi (1840-1895) and HuYuan (1823-1886)
Portrait of Gao Yong
1877
hanging scroll, ink and color on paper
139 x 48.5 cm
Shanghai Museum
This painting depicts the distinctive profile of the artists' mutual friend,
the painter and patron Gao Yong, on his twenty-seventh birthday. Ren Yi's
careful rendering of the sitter's face and hair contrast with the stylized
rendering of the draperies, a manner clearly related to that of Ren Xiong
and Ren Xun. Ren Yi studied portraiture as a child with his father, who
was a folk painter in modern Shaoxing, Zhejiang. He later became a follower
of Ren Xiong and Ren Xun, and after moving to Shanghai is believed to have
studied drawing at the Catholic art school at Tushanwan. His portraiture
of the 1870s and 1880s competes successfully with images produced by the
newly popular Shanghai photography studios, as this example may demonstrate.
Hu Yuan painted the pine tree, a symbol of longevity.