On a hunting expedition, King Wen happened upon a strange white-haired man whiling away

his time fishing. After a brief exchange, the king realized that the old man, Lu Shang, was an astute political thinker and military strategist. The king enlisted him as prime minister, and Lu Shang later helped Wen's successor, King Wu, overthrow the tyrannical last ruler of the Shang dynasty (1750-1045 BCE) and establish the Zhou dynasty (1122-221 BCE).

The figure on the right has been identified as Lin Hejing, a Song dynasty scholar and poet who lived in leisurely seclusion on West Lake. He loved plum blossoms and raised cranes, and it was said that the plum tree was his wife and the cranes his children. However, the distinctive headdress, the feathered fan, and the tiger skin rug upon which he sits might indicate another well-known person, Zhuge Liang, a great strategist and statesman of the Shu Kingdom.

Sh^ohaku's strong and flawless brushwork and his use of light and dark create striking contrasts. The sharp focus of the individual elements in the foreground and middle ground -- every nook and cranny in the rocks, for instance, and every weave in the fisherman's shelter -- tends to flatten them out into a single plane These details of the painting are incongruous with the deep space defined by the clouds and misty horizon and the moon and distant geese in the Lu Shang painting, and the meandering stream flowing between receding hills in the Lin Hejing painting. There is a distinct quirkiness about the paintings that supports Sh^ohaku's reputation for eccentricity among his contemporaries. (Shown with 2000.54, Lu Shang (Tai Gongwang) Fishing)