Ma Lin () ( – after 1256) was a Chinese

court painter A court painter was an artist who painted for the members of a royal or princely family, sometimes on a fixed salary and on an exclusive basis where the artist was not supposed to undertake other work. Painters were the most common, but the cour ...

during the

Song dynasty The Song dynasty ( ) was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 960 to 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song, who usurped the throne of the Later Zhou dynasty and went on to conquer the rest of the Fiv ...

active during the early to mid 13th century.Barnhart: Page 133. He was the son of the famous Chinese painter

Ma Yuan Ma Yuan may refer to: * Ma Yuan (Han dynasty) (馬援; 14 BC – 49 AD), general of the Han dynasty * Ma Yuan (painter) (馬遠; 1160–1225), painter of the Song dynasty * Ma Yuan (judge) (:zh:馬原 (政治人物), 馬原; born 1930), a former V ...

, from whom he learned the art of painting. One of his best known paintings is ''Night Outing with Candles'', which depicts a gentleman sitting in the doorway of a pavilion, facing four pairs of tall candles amongst flowering

crab apple ''Malus'' ( or ) is a genus of about 32–57 species of small deciduous trees or shrubs in the family Rosaceae, including the domesticated orchard apple, crab apples (sometimes known in North America as crabapples) and wild apples. The genus i ...

trees. It illustrates a poem by the famous (dissident poet and artist)

Su Shi Su Shi ( zh, t=, s=苏轼, p=Sū Shì; 8 January 1037 – 24 August 1101), courtesy name Zizhan (), art name Dongpo (), was a Chinese poet, essayist, calligrapher, painter, scholar-official, literatus, artist, pharmacologist, and gastronome wh ...

: "My fear is that in the depths of night, the flowers will fall asleep and depart, so I light the tall candles to illuminate their red beauty.".Wang Yao-t'ing, ''Looking at Chinese Painting'', Nigensha Publishing Co. Ltd., Tokyo, Japan (first English edition 1996), p, 88. A full moon in the sky overhead confirms its nighttime setting.

Notes

References

* Barnhart, R. M. et al. (1997). Three thousand years of Chinese painting. New Haven, Yale University Press.

External links

Sung and Yuan paintings
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Ma Lin (see list of paintings) Year of death unknown Court painters Song dynasty landscape painters Artists from Hangzhou Year of birth unknown 12th-century Chinese painters 13th-century Chinese painters Painters from Zhejiang {{China-painter-stub