A Comparative Study of Early and Late Painting Styles in Zhang Daqian’s Lotus Works

Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) is an extremely influential painter in the history of modern Chinese painting. Among his works, the lotus paintings hold a special place in Zhang Daqian’s artistic career. This paper conducts a comparative study of Zhang Daqian’s early and late lotus paintings through quantitative analysis on three levels. Firstly, from the perspective of ink color, a quantitative comparative analysis concludes that the early works are characterized by high brightness, low contrast, and negative skewness. This indicates that the paintings possess a soft, delicate, and bright visual effect, giving a fresh and tranquil feeling. In contrast, the late works are characterized by low brightness, high contrast, and zero skewness, presenting a strong contrast, vivid colors, and visual balance. The color distribution in the late paintings is relatively balanced, forming a stark contrast to the soft style of the early works. Secondly, from the level of visual complexity, it is concluded that the early works have unique texture characteristics, while the late works are more uniform, consistent, and regular in these aspects, with stronger color contrast and dynamics, and more boldness. Finally, by extracting specific elements of “flowers, stems, leaves” for texture strokes and ink color gradation analysis, applying data quantification-based feature extraction and capturing important data information in MATLAB for data comparison, combined with professional analysis and research on related indicators of the artwork, the comparative results of quantitative analysis of Zhang Daqian’s early and late lotus paintings are given, summarizing the quantitative analysis results in descriptive language. The experimental results show that the algorithm has good performance, providing a solid basis for the quantitative analysis and comparative study of Zhang Daqian’s lotus paintings from early and late periods, and objectively presenting the style changes from “following the ancient” to “transforming the ancient” in Zhang Daqian’s lotus paintings through data.