The restoration of a native dynasty made China once again a great power. The Ming dynasty felt a kinship with the heyday of the Tang dynasty (618–907), a connection reflected in the vigour and rich colour of Ming arts and crafts. Early in the 1400s, China again expanded into Central Asia, and maritime expeditions brought Central Asian products around the Indian Ocean to its own shores. Chinese pottery exports also greatly increased. The 15th century was a period of settled prosperity and great achievement in the arts, but the last century of the dynasty was marked by corruption at court and a deep discontent among the scholar-gentry that is reflected in their painting.

The first Ming emperor, Hongwu, was a highly distrustful personality whose vengeful focus fell upon Suzhou, the local base of his chief rival for the throne as well as home to the Yuan period (1206–1368) literati painting movement. So many artists became victim to his recriminations, typically for political rather than artistic reasons, that a novel movement in Chinese painting history was nearly halted. Among those literati painters who lost their lives during this period were Wang Meng, Zhao Yuan, Xu Ben, Chen Ruyan, Zhang Yu, Zhou Wei, and Sheng Zhu. Rejecting the individualist standard of literati painting, early Ming emperors who revived the custom of summoning painters to court sought instead to create a cultural bridge to the last native regimes, the Tang and Song. Although they revived Song professional court styles, they never organized their painters into a central teaching academy and indeed sometimes dealt quite harshly with them. Scholar-painters, increasingly few in number in the early Ming, stayed at home in the south, further widening the gulf between themselves and court artists.

Early Ming court painters such as Xie Huan and Li Zai at first revived the Tang blue-and-green and Bei Song court styles of Guo Xi. Bian Wenjin and his follower Lu Ji carried forward the bird-and-flower painting tradition of Huang Quan, Cui Bai, and the Song emperor Huizong. Gradually, however, the Nan Song styles of the landscape artists Li Tang, Ma Yuan, and Xia Gui came to hold sway, beginning with Dai Jin, who served under the fifth emperor, the Xuande emperor (himself a painter of moderate ability). Nevertheless, Dai Jin, who was opposed in the Beijing capital by jealous court rivals and who found the restrictions there intolerable (as did many others who followed), was affected by the calligraphically inspired scholars’ art: his brushwork shows far greater freedom than is found in his Nan Song models.

Like Dai Jin, many professional painters went to Beijing from the old Nan Song capital region around Hangzhou, and they were said to belong to the Zhe school of painting. Many of the so-called Zhe school artists were in fact scholars disgruntled with the autocratic Ming politics and drawn to Daoist eremitic themes and eccentric brushwork. Most dazzling among them, perhaps, was Wu Wei, from Jiangxia in Hubei, whose drunken bouts at court were forgiven out of admiration for his genius with the brush.

Among the few important amateur painters to hold a scholarly position at the early Ming court was Wang Fu, who survived a long period of banishment to the frontier under the first emperor to return as a court calligrapher. He became a key figure in the survival and transmission of Yuan literati style and was the first to single out the masters Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng as models. Other early Ming scholar-official painters in the Yuan tradition were the bamboo painter Xia Chang and Liu Jue, who retired to Suzhou at the age of 50 after having been president of the Board of Justice. In his landscapes Liu Jue gives to the cool, often austere style of the Yuan masters a looser, more genial character, thus making them more accessible to the large number of amateur gentlemen-painters who flourished in the Jiangnan region—notably those in and around Suzhou, during the settled middle years of the 15th century.

The Wu district of Jiangsu, in which Suzhou lies, gave its name to the Wu school of landscape painting, dominated in the late 15th century by Shen Zhou, a friend and pupil of Liu Jue. Shen Zhou never became an official but instead devoted his life to painting and poetry. He often painted in the manner of the Yuan masters, but his interpretations of Ni Zan and Wu Zhen are more clearly structured and firmer in brushwork. His work is unsurpassed in all Chinese art for its humane feeling; the gentle and unpretentious figures he introduced give his paintings great appeal. Shen Zhou commanded a wide range of styles and techniques, on which he impressed his warm and vigorous personality. He also became the first to establish among the literati painters a flower painting tradition. These works, executed in the “boneless” fashion developed by 10th-century court artists but with the freedom of such late Song Chan painters as Muqi, were followed with greater technical versatility by Chen Shun and Xu Wei in the late Ming and then by Shitao (Daoji) and Zhu Da of the early Qing. Their work, in turn, served as the basis for the revival of flower painting in the late 19th and the 20th century.

Shen Zhou’s younger contemporary and friend Wen Zhengming showed an even greater interest in the styles of the past, which he reinterpreted with a refined and scholarly precision. He, too, had many styles and was a distinguished calligrapher. He was an active teacher of painting as well, and among his gifted pupils were his son Wen Jia and his nephew Wen Boren. Their landscapes display a lyrical delicacy in composition, touch, and colour, qualities that in the work of lesser late Ming artists of the Wu school degenerated into a precious and artificial style.

Three early 16th-century professional Suzhou masters, Zhou Chen, Qiu Ying, and Tang Yin, established a somewhat different standard from that of the scholarly Wu group, never renouncing the professional’s technical skills yet mastering the literary technique as well. They achieved a wide range, and sometimes a blend, of styles that could hardly be dismissed by scholarly critics and that won great popular acclaim. In fact, Tang Yin, who was not only a student of Zhou Chen but also a brilliant scholar and longtime friend of Wen Zhengming, became mythologized in the centuries that followed.

In the succeeding generations, other painting masters similarly helped confuse the distinction between amateur and professional standards, and, in the early 17th century, a number of these artists also showed the first influence of the European technique that had been brought to China through engravings and then oil paintings by Matteo Ricci and other Jesuit missionaries after 1600. Among these painters were the landscapists Wu Bin from Nanjing, Zhang Hong from Suzhou, and Lan Ying from Qiantang in Zhejiang province. The southern painter Chen Hongshou and the Beijing artist Cui Zizhong initiated the first major revival of figure painting since Song times, possibly as a result of their encounters with Western art. Perspective and shading effects appear among other naturalistic features in the art of this generation, along with a newfound interest in saturated colours and an attraction to formal distortion, which may have derived in part from a fascination with the unfamiliar in Western art. Beyond the revived interest in naturalism, which seems to have inspired in some artists a renewed attention to Five Dynasties (907–960) and Song painting (as the last period in which Chinese artists had displayed knowledge about such matters), there occurred an even more fundamental questioning of contemporary standards. In the work of Chen and Cui, which exhibits all the aforementioned qualities, an almost unprecedented interest in grotesquerie and satire visually enlivens their work, yet it also reflects something of the restless individualism and deep disillusionment that were part of the spirit of this period of national decline. The breakdown of orthodoxy reached an extreme form in Xu Wei. In his explosive paintings, chiefly of flowers, plants, and bamboo, he showed an absolute mastery of brush and ink and a total disregard of tradition.

Standing above all others of this period in terms of historical impact, the theorist, critic, and painter Dong Qichang saw the proliferation of styles as a symptom of the decline in morale of the scholar class as the Ming became increasingly corrupt. His aim to reestablish standards in landscape painting paralleled a movement to restore traditional virtue to government. In his brief but influential essay “Huashuo” (“Comments on Painting”), he set out what he held to be the proper lineage of scholarly painting models, from Wang Wei of the Tang through Dong Yuan and Juran of the Five Dynasties, Su Dongpo and Mi Fu of the Song, Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng of the Yuan, and Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming of the Ming. He labeled these artists as “Southern school” in reference to the Southern school of Chan Buddhism and its philosophy of spontaneous enlightenment, while he rejected such “Northern school” (i.e., gradualist, pedantic) artists as Guo Xi, Ma Yuan, Xia Gui, and Qui Ying. Dong believed that the greatest painters were highly creative individuals who, to be followed effectively, had to be creatively reinterpreted. Appropriately, his own landscape painting was often quite original, sometimes daringly so, even while based on a systematic reduction and synthetic reintegration of past styles. However, having breathed new life into a troubled tradition by looking inward and to the past, his reinterpretations (particularly of the styles of Dong Yuan and Juran) set an ideal beyond which his contemporaries and followers could not go without either a great leap of imagination, a direct return to nature, or a departure from the historical core of Chinese painting standards. Only a few artists, in the early Qing, could achieve this, primarily through the route of artistic imagination; many more throughout the Qing followed Dong too slavishly in theory without attaining new heights or perspectives in actual practice.

One further feature of late Ming art was the popularity of wood-block printing, including the appearance of a sophisticated tradition of polychrome printing, done in imitation of painting. Among the earliest major examples were the collections of ink designs Fangshi Mopu of 1588 and Chengshi Moyuan of 1606 (“Mr. Fang Yulu’s Ink Catalog” and “Mr. Cheng Dayue’s Ink Garden,” respectively); both catalogs utilized graphic designs by significant artists to promote the products of Anhui province’s foremost manufacturers of ink sticks. The Shizhuzhai Shuhuapu (“Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Painting and Calligraphy”), produced by Hu Zhengyan between 1619 and 1633, set the highest standard for polychrome wood-block printing and helped influence the development of colour printing in Japan. Painters such as Chen Hongshou participated in print production in forms ranging from book illustration to playing cards, while others, including Xiao Yuncong, generated high-quality topographical illustrations. Through such artists, the medium came to influence painting as well as to be influenced by it.