Wen Tong (1019–1079) was a Northern Song painter

Chinese painting

Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. The earliest paintings were not representational but ornamental; they consisted of patterns or designs rather than pictures. Early pottery was painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals...

 born in Sichuan

Sichuan

' , known formerly in the West by its postal map spellings of Szechwan or Szechuan is a province in Southwest China with its capital in Chengdu...

 famous for his ink bamboo paintings. He was one of the paragons of "scholar's painting" (shi ren hua), which idealised spontaneity and painting without financial reward.

He could hold two brushes in one hand and paint two different distanced bamboos simultaneously. He did not need to see the bamboo while he painted them because he had seen a lot of them. One Chinese idiom from him goes "there are whole bamboos in his heart" (胸有成竹), meaning that one has a well-thought-out plan in his mind.

As many artists of his era, Wen Tong also wrote poetry. As attested in his poems, he had at least one golden-hair monkey

Golden Snub-nosed Monkey

The golden snub-nosed monkey is an Old World monkey in the Colobinae subfamily. It is endemic to a small area in temperate, mountainous forests of central and Southwest China. The Chinese name is sichuan golden hair monkey . It is also widely referred to as the sichuan snub-nosed monkey...

 (金丝狨) and a number of pet gibbon

Gibbon

Gibbons are apes in the family Hylobatidae . The family is divided into four genera based on their diploid chromosome number: Hylobates , Hoolock , Nomascus , and Symphalangus . The extinct Bunopithecus sericus is a gibbon or gibbon-like ape which, until recently, was thought to be closely related...

s, whose graceful brachiation

Brachiation

Brachiation is a form of arboreal locomotion in which primates swing from tree limb to tree limb using only their arms.- Brachiators :...

he admired. An elegy written by him upon the death of one his gibbons has been preserved in the collection of his works.