Yan Zhenqing was born in The Wolf Evil Yan. Although he was a noble family who had been brilliant for hundreds of years, Yan Zhenqing experienced bitterness when he was young. Yan Zhenqing lost his father at the age of three and lived alone with his mother Yin's uncle. At the age of thirteen, my uncle died and lived with my grandfather. Under the strict discipline of her mother, Yan Zhenqing studied hard and encouraged herself. Because his family is poor, Yan Zhenqing sometimes even "sweeps the wall with loess and learns calligraphy" because he can't afford pens and paper. "Night light even chicken, is a person reading a book. Black hair doesn't know how to study early, and Bai Shoufang regrets studying late. " This famous poem "Encouraging Learning" is a portrayal of Yan Zhenqing's hard work. In addition, he was educated by his aunt Yan Zhenqing, who was selected as the female history of Wu Zetian because of her "intensive study of national history and extensive use of etiquette and righteousness". When Yan Zhenqing's uncle Yan was falsely accused, she and her two sisters were not afraid of the harshness of Wu Zetian, cut off their ears to defend their unjust case, and finally saved Yan from death. Yan Zhenqing not only personally taught Yan Zhenqing literature, but also deeply influenced Yan Zhenqing because of his heroic feats.
According to the family precepts of our country, the five ancestors of Yan Zhenqing and the family precepts of Yan Zhitui in the Northern Qi Dynasty, future generations should "work in Wang Zhidao first and put family business first". Calligraphy is just one of the miscellaneous arts, so you can pay a little attention to it. Yan Zhenqing obviously devoted great energy to calligraphy. In the second year of Tianbao, Yan Zhenqing went to Luoyang to worship Zhang Xu as his teacher. In the fifth year of Tianbao, Yan Zhenqing visited Zhang Xu for the second time and wrote Twelve Meanings of Zhang Changshi's Writing Style. Long before Zhang Xu became his teacher, the earliest extant Yan Zhenqing calligraphy Epitaph of Wang Lin was written in the 29th year of Kaiyuan, which is very similar to Zhang Xu's regular script style. However, Yan Zhenqing studied Wang Xizhi, Wang Xianzhi, Ou Yangxun, Yu Shinan, Chu Suiliang, etc. After studying Chu Suiliang's calligraphy, his calligraphy style gradually distanced himself from Zhang Xu, and the Epitaph of Guo written by Yan Zhenqing has begun to take shape. What is commendable is that Yan Zhenqing absorbed nutrition from folk calligraphy art, especially the calligraphy of writing classics, and finally realized the integration of the three tributaries of regular script: tablet, post and classics. The first sign of this perfect integration is "many pagodas and monuments".
From Yan Zhenqing's calligraphy works handed down from generation to generation, we can see that his calligraphy art is gradually improved with the growth of age, the strength of writing, the proficiency of skills, the accumulation of writing experience and the richness of expression methods, and people and books are getting old. At the same time, it can also reflect the difference of calligraphy content, writing artistic conception, purpose and object, and produce different artistic effects, which is precisely the soul of calligraphy itself. At the same time, influenced by Buddhism and Taoism at that time, it eliminated distractions, cultivated pure heart, and treated calligraphy persistently, so that its thought, baptism and enlightenment formed its artistic characteristics. Yan Zhenqing expanded his pursuit of calligraphy art with his own temperament. The breath of the times is the soil for his growth, and it is also the natural expression of Yan Zhenqing's inner experience. With an open mind and personality temperament, he poured his profound and solid foundation into pen and ink, forming a calligraphy style with broad structure, sparse inside and dense outside.
Yan Zhenqing's calligraphy, especially regular script, is solid and dignified, honest and honest, and the characters and books are highly unified, which is a model for learning in past dynasties. Therefore, when Yan Shu came out, there were many scholars, whose influence has been so far.