[2] Initially aspiring to be a government official, Wang later earned considerable recognition as an artist who specialised in plum blossom paintings.
Rejecting numerous job offers in the governmental sector, Wang Mian became a "scholar-in-retirement" bar a short stint as a teacher.
[4] In The Scholars, Wang's story is heavily dramatised, and his disillusionment with the private sector is attributed not to his failures at the examinations, but his realising "the empty vanity of officialdom".
[11] Wang's painting Prunus in Moonlight was displayed at the June 1985 Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery.
The New York Times commented that the moon and the flowering plum tree in Prunus in Moonlight "play out the kind of male-female, mind-body, moon-earth drama that is not unfamiliar in 20th-century Western art, particularly after Surrealism", going further to compare Wang with Caspar David Friedrich.
[7] In his 1976 book Hills Beyond a River, James Cahill exalts Wang Mian as the "most famous of Yuan plum painters".