(b Jiangsu Province; fl 1465–1509). Chinese painter and scholar. Active in Beijing, he was one of the finest figure painters of the Ming period (1368–1644) and was also known for his landscapes, portraits and paintings of birds and animals and plants (none extant). His classical heritage can be seen in his earliest handscroll of Qu Yuan’s Nine Songs (1473; Beijing Pal. Mus.), in which the elegant figures display a lively ink line with limited use of ink wash, in the baimiao (‘plain-line’) style derived from Li Gonglin. Another handscroll painting in the same collection, Poems by Ancient Worthies (see Levenson, no. 294, pp. 440–42, and Xu Bangda, pl. 311), consists of a series of nine (originally twelve) scenes depicting scholars in landscape or garden settings. It was also executed in the baimiao manner, with handsome calligraphy of Tang (AD 618–907) and Song (960–1279) poems by Li Bai, Han Yu and Du Fu written by Jin Cong (1447–1501), a poet and, like Du, a literati (wenren) painter. Each scene sensitively portrays the central emotions of the accompanying poem: the first scene shows the famous 4th-century calligrapher Wang Xizhi writing the text of the Daode jing (‘Classic of the Way and Virtue’) for a Daoist priest in exchange for a live goose, which Wang had earlier tried unsuccessfully to buy from him.

• Du Jin