Song dynasty landscape painting

Around the year 1000, painters of China's Northern Song dynasty turned the mountain landscape into the highest form of painting. The best known masterpiece is Fan Kuan's Travelers among Mountains and Streams, a hanging scroll over two meters tall, in which a huge cliff towers over a waterfall and a tiny mule train on the road below. The men and animals are almost lost against the scale of nature. The work is held in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and counts among the most famous paintings in Chinese art.¹²

The Song dynasty, founded in 960, was a prosperous, urban and educated society with a state run by scholar officials. The painting developed from Tang traditions and from the Daoist and Buddhist view that people are one small part of a vast natural order. Artists such as Li Cheng, Fan Kuan and Guo Xi worked with brush and black ink on silk, using fine variations in tone to create mist, distance and depth. Guo Xi, who painted Early Spring in 1072, wrote an essay on landscape that describes three kinds of distance: high, deep and level.²

Later Song painters made the ideas more intimate and poetic. In the Southern Song of the 1100s and 1200s, artists such as Ma Yuan and Xia Gui worked with empty space and suggestion, and scholar amateurs including Su Shi stressed personal expression over technical skill, which led to the literati painting of later centuries. Chan (Zen) Buddhist monks carried the style to Japan, where it shaped ink painting by Sesshu, and it also spread to Korea. For a thousand years Chinese artists measured their landscapes against these models.