Academic Painters 画师
From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki
Throughout Chinese history, as early as the Six Dynasties (220-589 AD), artists--painters, in particular--were trained and employed as professionals. Such artists were called Academic painters, and, much like the favorites of The Academy centuries later in France, represented the golden standard of artistic virtuoso.
Academic painters were highly skilled craftsmen, who aimed to achieved marvelous effects through their use of colors, realistic or highly conventional representations of people or things, spectacular detail, applications of shiny gold leaf, and so forth. The Imperial court employed many such men, and others made their way in the world by selling their paintings to wealthy patrons and customers.
Academic painters were professionals, both in their virtuoso skills, and in the fact that they depended on permanent employment as artists, or on selling their paintings to live. While many were educated to some degree, few possessed the literary background of a literatus, and none made their way in life fulfilling the Confucian ideal of governmental service.
Literati painters, on the other hand, were amateurs -- they painted as a means of self-expression; both forms were inheritances from the Neo-Daoist era of the Six Dynasties.[1]
