Mi Fu
Mi Fu was one of the highly gifted gentleman-painters. He was not a poet or philosopher, nevertheless, he was brilliant intellectually. With his very keen talent of artistic observation together with sense of humor and literary ability, he established for himself a prominent place among Chinese art-historians; his contributions in this field are still highly valued because they are based on what he had seen with his own eyes and not simply on what he had heard or learned from his forerunners. Mi Fu had the courage to express his own views, even when these were different from the prevailing ones or official opinions. His notes about painting and calligraphy are of great interest to art historians because they are spontaneous expressions of his own observations and independent ideas that help to characterize himself as well as the artists whose works he discusses.