Wen Peng

CHINA, Jiangsu, Suzhou; Ming dynasty

Wen Peng was the eldest son of Wen Zhengming and older brother of Wen Jia. Also known as Shoucheng, he was a seal engraver, calligrapher, and painter from Changzhou (present day Suzhou, Jiangsu) and served in the Imperial Academy. His calligraphic skills, which he learned from his family, were modeled after various masters. In his later years, he was influenced by Sun Guoting, and he excelled in regular, running, and cursive scripts, with a specialization in seal and clerical scripts.
Wen’s bamboo paintings in ink were comparable with the treasured works of Wen Tong. In addition to his verdant landscape paintings, which were similar to the style of Wu Zhen, he was also skilled in painting flowers and fruits. He modeled his seal engravings after works from the Qin (221–207 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE) dynasties and initiated the trend of literati engraving their own seals. He is regarded as the founder of the Wumen school and together with He Zhen of the Hui school, they were known as Wen-He. Also good at poetry, Wen wrote Poems of an Erudite.
Wen’s calligraphic work, Impromptu Poems from Living Leisurely, is kept at the Guangdong Provincial Museum in Guangzhou. In addition, Memorial on Dispatching the Troops is at the Tianjin Museum; Postscript on Autobiography of Huaisu and Seven-Character Poem are at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan; and Seven-Character Quatrain is at the Palace Museum in Beijing. Several other works of art by Wen, such as a seal engraving of the Heart Sutra, and the red-character square seal, Deep Place Among the Seventy-Two Peaks, still exist today.