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= Wen Chu = Wen Chu(1595-1634), courtesy name Duan Rong, was a female painter in Ming Dynasty. She was a fourth-generational descendant of Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), the leading painter of Suzhou. She was the great granddaughter of Wen Jia (1501-I583), granddaughter of Wen Yuanshan (1554-I589), and daughter of Wen Congjian (1574-I648). The Wen family was an illustrious one in the Wu region, having produced many talented artists without interruption from the Song dynasty. Among the literary gentry the Wen family was regarded as preserving the highest moral standards.

Biography
Education was an essential part of the disciplined training in Wen family life and Wen Chu, together with her brother, Wen Ran (I596-I667), began to paint when she was a child. Before she was twenty years old, Wen Chu was married to Zhao Jun (died 1640), a student of her father and descendent of another old distinguished family. The marriage was a congenial one; Wen Chu and Zhao Jun were devoted to each other and respected their separate interests in painting and etymology.

As the inheritance from both the Wen and Zhao families diminished, Zhao Jun, who had never worked and detested having to attend to financial affairs, simply indulged himself in connoisseurship. Wu Chu assumed responsibility for their livelihood and became a professional painter. The fame of her forebears must have helped Wen Chu to retain her dignity, even as a woman engaged in the art profession. She achieved great success. There was so much demand for her work that Wen Chu had to train some maids as assistants and unscrupulous artists took advantage of her fame by producing forgeries even during her lifetime.

Theme and Style
Wen Chu excelled in painting unusual flowers and small insects, capturing their likeness in meticulous detail. Inspired by illustrated Bencao, or books on Chinese herbal medicine, she worked in the same manner, striving for precise identification. Painting one specimen a day, Wen Chu completed one thousand specimens in as many days; her pen-name, Hanshan, is included in the title of the encyclopedic work 寒山草木昆虫（Patterns of Plants and Insects by Hanshan). Sadly, this album has vanished without a trace. Wen Chu took her profession seriously and worked hard for more than a decade before she died at the young age of thirty-nine.

Wen Chu's paintings are generally attentive to detail. Her work is always disciplined and solid, even when she used broader and freer brush strokes or mogu (boneless) technique. Transcending the botanical accuracy of the Song dynasty academic style, Wen Chu rendered every blade of grass and each insect with a sense of humanitarian care, a quality that characterizes her feminist fineness. A similar sensitivity can be seen clearly in paintings by male artists who worked later than Wen Chu: Yun Shouping (1633-90), Ma Yuanyu (1669-1722), Jiang Tingxi (1669-1732), and Zou Yigui (I685-1766).

Influence
Wen Chu gave private painting lessons to ladies of the gentry class and many of her students achieved recognition for their fine work. She also established a model of respectability for professional women painters from good families. By contrast, Miss Qiu (active mid-sixteenth century), the daughter of Qiu Ying and a professional painter who lived earlier than Wen Chu, was never properly accepted in the field; even her given name is not recorded. Women painters from gentry families who achieved professional success after Wen Chu included Chen Shu (1660-1736), Yun Bing (early eighteenth century), and Ma Quan (early eighteenth century). There are no colorful stories or intimate personal details describing these gentle ladies, but their works were highly regarded by their contemporaries.

History and Cultural Background
In Ming Dynasty, official family's young ladies whose social status were nobler had more chance to accept education than those of civilian estate. They resorted to a series of ways to obtain education, such as employing famous teachers, obtaining knowledge from their parents, or getting edification from religion preaching. In Ming Dynasty, education of official family's young ladies took on such characteristics as getting enlightenment from woman-education books, the feminizing of cultural production, famous ladies incorporating and publishing poetry anthology, as well as talent ladies' regional distribution. Because of commodity economy's stimulation, culture education's popularization, family environment's edification and advanced thinking's promotion, a large number of talent ladies of official families emerged and female culture took on prosperous phenomenon.

In Ming Dynasty, because the internal contradictions of the ruling class intensified, the individual liberation movement appeared in the ideological and literary world. The consciousness of the citizenship and the new values of life were popular, and humanity was valued in Ming society. Meanwhile, the awareness of equality between men and women, and freedom of marriage appeared; the feudal ethics and social prejudice "women's incompetence is virtue" were bashed, which provided official family's young ladies an unstoppable impetus to break through feudal imprisonment.

The official family's young ladies had priority access to education than ordinary civilian women because of high social status. First of all, official family could afford the cost of education for their sons and daughters and had the willing to increase investment in education because of relatively high income; secondly, official family's men were generally well educated, and hoped their wives were literate to improving the ability of teaching their offsprings and managing their finances. The talented women brought a good reputation to the family and thus improve the family’s culture atmosphere. Thirdly, women in these families had prosperous life conditions, and were freed from household duties; therefore, they had more leisure time and better educational conditions to learn deeper in literature and art. In addition, because the internal contradictions of the ruling class intensified in Ming Dynasty, the individual liberation movement appeared in the ideological and literary world. The consciousness of the citizenship and the new values of life were popular, and humanity was valued in Ming society. Meanwhile, the awareness of equality between men and women, and freedom of marriage appeared; the feudal ethics and social prejudice "women's incompetence is virtue" were bashed, which provided official family's young ladies an unstoppable impetus to break through feudal imprisonment.