thumb|right|Portrait of Bada Shanren, 1674, ink on paper, Badashanren Memorial Hall.
Zhu Da (), also known by his pen name Bada Shanren (), was a late-Ming and early-Qing dynasty Chinese painter, calligrapher, and poet. He was born in Nanchang, Jiangxi, in 1626, at during the Ming-Qing Transition. Zhu was mentally ill and displayed erratic behavior. He embarked on an artistic career soon after reentering secular life in 1680, producing works that featured his calligraphy, painting, and poetry. Most of the time, he painted simple subjects like flowers, plants, and animals and kept most of the given space empty.
Some of his artwork were metaphors on the fall of the Ming dynasty and its failure after being destroyed by the Qing. In the early 1600s, around the time Bada was born, the Ming government was disintegrating from factional conflict and rebellion. Facing a rebellion led by Li Zicheng in 1644, the last Ming emperor committed suicide. Wu Sangui asked for help from the Qing dynasty to crush Li Zicheng's rebellion. His grandfather Zhu Duozheng was a poet, painter, calligrapher, and seal-carver, and his father was most likely Zhu Moujin, a painter and calligrapher mute since birth. Bada grew up under such artistic influences, studying poetry, calligraphy, and painting through his family's works. Bada also received a classical education and passed the first-level test of the civil service examinations in the early 1640s. He married his first wife in his late teens, with whom he had at least one child.
Later life
Around 1680, Bada left the priesthood and refashioned himself as a professional painter and poet. He met the poet Qiu Lian and Qiu's father-in-law Hu Yitang in the early 1670s. Despite his abandonment of priestly duties, Bada was still influenced by Buddhist teachings and remained close friends with several Buddhist monks.
The Portrait of Geshan, painted in 1674, reflects Bada's refashioning from a monk to scholarly artist. According to Wang Fangyu, a scholar and collector of Bada Shanren's work, the straw hat and loose, long robes make Bada look more like a scholar than a monk. Many believed he was feigning madness to eschew political involvement. From 1684 onward, Bada mostly stayed put in Nanchang, devoting himself to painting and calligraphy, and in the mid-1690s built a painting studio. With his scanty earnings, he lived in a small residential quarter in the southern part of Nanchang.
Artistic pursuits
Calligraphy
Bada's family members, including his grandfather and father, were calligraphers, whose works Bada studied from a young age. Not yet settled on a style, Bada employed a wide range of script types, including the standard script kaishu, fully cursive script caoshu, and semicursive script xingshu. His standard scripts were modelled on the precisely executed kaishu script of Tang calligrapher Ouyang Xun. In his cursive and semicursive scripts, Bada emulated the swift and fluid brushstrokes of Ming calligrapher Dong Qichang, achieving the flying white calligraphic effect. Toward the end of his priesthood, Bada began to explore the exaggerated cursive script of Song calligrapher Huang Tingjian. He rendered it in a style not identical to Huang Tingjian's but combinative of various script types. His horizontal strokes were attenuated like Huang Tingjian's, while his corner strokes were sharp like Ouyang Xun's. By 1689, he had developed his own style. Despite having established his own style, Bada remained devoted to the study of past calligraphic masters, including Wang Xizhi and the monk Huaisu, in the final years of his life.
Painting
Bada Shanren's earliest extant paintings were produced during his years in the Buddhist monastery where he practiced painting as a hobby. The subject of his paintings were simple objects like flowers, fruits, and vegetables. From 1690 to 1694, he shifted his attention to fish, which he often depicted alone at the center of an empty composition. The poems that he wrote often included references to classical texts and obscure variants of characters, granting only those with the same background knowledge to decipher their meaning.
Works
Overview
The vast majority of Bada Shanren's works – 167 out of 179 – were produced between 1684 and 1705 during Bada's sixties and seventies.
Early works (1659–1678)
Only eleven of Bada's surviving works were produced during his years in the Buddhist temple. The angular brushstrokes in his works were achieved using the side hairs of the brush. The sixth leaf of the album is a painting of a mandarin fish. The fish stares up at Bada's poem on the upper left-hand corner.
Names, seals, and signatures
The names which Bada used in his seals and signatures have been referenced to determine the chronology of his oeuvre. Like most literati painters, Bada had multiple style and poetic names that each symbolized a virtue, ability, desire, or event. In his artwork, he used these names in lieu of his formal, or assigned, names. After leaving the priesthood, from 1680 to 1684, he invented new names while keeping the name Geshan. Most of his new names contained the word lu, meaning donkey, a condescending descriptor for a Buddhist monk.
Like other late Ming painters of his time, Bada carved seals and incorporated them in his art. He came up with multiple seal designs for some of his names. For instance, eleven different seals were found for the name Bada Shanren. He sometimes changed the form of his signature for the same name. For his signature Chuanqi, which he used from 1659 to 1676, he changed the character for qi in 1665.
Zhang Daqian was a twentieth-century Chinese painter who made copies of Bada's work. Zhang's copies can be distinguished from Bada's real works through an examination of brushstrokes. Zhang's 1930s reproductions of Bada's midlife work featured softer and more rounded brushstrokes compared to the sharp, sideways brushstrokes characteristic of Bada's work.
Exhibitions
In 1986, an exhibition and symposium were held in Nanchang, Bada's childhood home, in honor of his 360th birthday. In 1991, the Yale University Art Gallery held a major exhibition of the artist's work. From 2015 to 2016, the Freer Gallery displayed fifty-one of Bada's works in an exhibition titled Enigmas: The Art of Bada Shanren (1626-1705). A reduced version of this exhibition later went on to show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Gallery
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Image:Chu Ta 003.jpg|Two Birds, Sen-oku Hakuko Kan, Kyoto, Japan
Image:Fish and Rocks. Zhu Da. MET DP123757.jpg| Metropolitan Museum, New York
Image:White Plum Blossoms.jpg| National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Image:Bada Shanren NelsonAtkins.jpg| Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas city, USA
</gallery>