[Chu Te-jun] (b Henan Province, 1294; d Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, 1365). Chinese painter and calligrapher. He was active in Jiangsu Province and was favored by the emperors Renzong (reg 1312–1321) and Yingzong (reg 1321–1323). In calligraphy he followed the Yuan-period (1279–1368) artists Xianyu Shu (1257–1302) and Zhao Mengfu (whose protégé he was at court), and in painting Guo Xi of the Northern Song period (960–1127). He formed a close friendship with the leading Koryŏ-period (918–1392) scholar and poet Yi Che-hyŏn, who spent many years in Beijing and who was instrumental in the transmission of Neo-Confucianism to Korea. A contemporary of the Four Masters of the late Yuan period, Zhu Derun also created a landscape style of his own, although it was not to be so influential as theirs. His painting Xiuye tu ('Refining the wilderness'; 1364; Beijing, Pal. Mus.; a close copy is in Washington, DC, Freer) is a short handscroll in ink and pale colors, followed by his own inscription explaining how the wilderness is refined through the presence of men of high moral character and wisdom. Against a setting of low background hills, two gentlemen are in earnest conversation in an isolated pavilion furnished only with a number of bronze vessels, a screen, and the end of a hanging painting, just visible on the wall. The composition, with the landscape drifting away into the distance at one end of the scroll, recalls Zhao Mengfu’s short handscroll ...