Qian Xuan, a native of Zhachuan (present-day Huzhou in Zhejiang province), had the style name Shunju and the sobriquet Zhaxi Weng (“Fellow from the Zha River”). He passed the imperial examinations at the provincial level and was recommended as a tributary presented scholar during the Southern Song dynasty’s Jingding reign period (1260-1265), but he did not work in government after the founding of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). For this painting, Shen employed various hues of green applied heavily in some places and sparingly in others in order to portray a solitary watermelon. The melon’s leaves are twisted into a variety of positions, and the nearby grasses as well as the veins in the melon’s vines and leaves were all depicted with the exacting detail and fresh elegance that are the stylistic inheritance of Southern Song dynasty painting. The story behind this painting’s poetic inscription comes from Shao Ping, who served as marquis of Dongling during the Qin dynasty (221-217 BCE). After the end of the Qin dynasty, Shao became a commoner and planted melons for a living. His produce was so delicious that they became known as “Dongling Melons,” which later became a metonym for giving up an official post and returning home to live in obscurity. Qian Xuan became a professional painter after the end of the Song dynasty—in this painting, his allusion to “Dongling Melons” makes light of his own circumstances.

Marine Creatures comprises four albums. The first three are held by the Palace Museum in Beijing, while the NPM possesses the fourth album, which presents illustrations of shrimp, crabs, conches, shellfish and other carapaced sea creatures. The preface in the first album, which was written in the ¬wu-yin year of the Kangxi period (1698), informs us that the albums’ creator was Nie Huang, a native of Qiantang (present-day Hangzhou in Zhejiang province) who was active during Emperor Kangxi’s reign. Nie filled the albums with illustrations of various sea creatures he saw or heard about, accompanying the images with records of common recipes for cooking them. 

This album leaf portrays three different types of crabs. One is the zebra crab, which is unpleasant to eat and yet is said to have the medicinal effect of bringing down swelling. Another is a type of stone crab, also unpalatable, but useful for treating eye afflictions and swelling when it is ground to a pulp. Finally, it includes a pea crab which has occupied an oyster shell. According to what Nie heard, people who eked their living from sea used to carefully look for this sort of small crab in the flesh of oysters, as it was considered a tabletop delicacy.

In this picture of a scallion, Pu Ru used long lines to paint the plant’s outline, the veins that run the length of its leaves, and the places where the leaves twist or fold back on themselves. Details such as the fronts and backs of the leaves being clearly delineated and the fragile skin of a newly budding leaf are all portrayed. The inscription reads, “Light green with a proliferation of long leaves. When the clear dew is not yet dry, its flavor is fresh and its root is edible. It’s not harvested like mustard plant or radish. Hsin-yu.” This passage alludes to the “Odes of Bei” in the Classic of Poetry, which has a line that reads, “When we gather mustard plants and radishes, we do not reject them because of their roots.” The meaning of this line is that, when harvesting wild mustard plants or wild radishes, one should not discard their leaves because their roots are bitter. The Compendium of Medical Herbs, a 16th century text, records, “When newly budding, it’s called ‘needle scallions;’ its leaves are called ‘scallion greens;’ its skin is called ‘scallion’s gown;’ its stalk is called ‘the white of the scallion.’” Pu Ru’s statement, “its flavor is fresh and its root is edible,” points out how the entire scallion plant is valuable. Chinese medicine texts even record that scallions’ fibrous roots can be used to “de-obstruct the yang” of the body.