Gu Kaizhi

A section from the "Admonitions Scroll," owned by the British Museum.

• Born: 344
• Died: 407

Gu Kaizhi is one of the most famous and admired early Chinese painters. Among the works attributed to him are the so-called "Admonitions Scroll" and "Nymph of the Luo River," two of the earliest and most admired works in the Chinese painting canon. Both of these, along with the rest of Gu's oeuvre, are today only known through later copies.

Some sources group Gu Kaizhi alongside Lu Tanwei and Zhang Sengyou as the three greatest painters of their time; however, of the three, it is Gu alone who regularly appears in survey courses and textbooks on Chinese art history.

References

• Conrad Schirokauer, et al, A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations, Fourth Edition, Cengage Learning (2012), 95.