The literati were artists who painted outside the court and royal affairs. They painted of nature and families and of things other than the court. Three good examples of the literati painters are Shen Zhou, Wu Zhen, and Dong Qichang.

Shen Zhou was a literati painter during the Ming Dynasty. Shen’s most famous painting is his Lofty Mount Lu. Shen painted this for one of his prior teachers as a birthday gift. The peaks of the mountain are meant to show the teacher’s virtue and character. Although Shen had never seen the mountain, he shows the enormous scale of the mountain by painting in a tiny person at the bottom of the image. This shows the enormity of the mountain because in the Asian style, the painting is meant to be read from the bottom, up, with the bottom of the page being the closest part and the top of the page being extremely far away. The fact that the person is placed at the bottom of the page shows that even though that is the closest part, the scale of a person is nowhere close to the scale of the mountain.

Wu Zhen was a literati painter during the Yuan Dynasty. His most famous painting is the Stalks of Bamboo by a Rock. He lived as a hermit, so his view of nature was different than that of other painters. His view of the bamboo stalks each as separate pieces in a work is different than other painters who showed clusters of bamboo stalks as a single piece of a work. The way that Wu zooms in on the bamboo and shows it up close has a sort of time-slowing effect, like in a movie when the slow motion action is used, and it gives us time to really examine the bamboo in its beautiful form.

Dong Qichang was a literati artist in the Ming Dynasty. he was a wealthy landowner and a high official, and also a poet, calligrapher, and painter. Dong developed the idea that most Chinese landscape painters could be classified into two main schools of design. These were the Northern school and the Southern school. The northern school was more precise and academic, while the south was freer and more subjective. Dong himself  was considered to be a part of the Southern school. He painted Dwelling in the Qingbain Mountains, which is a mixture of Dong’s own artistic innovations like the form in which he painted the mountains, and things he borrowed from previous painters such as the inscriptions at the top of the paper.