Traveling at Dawn in the Snowy Foothills

At right, a peasant with a load of firewood trudges across a low bridge in the direction of a private, walled estate, which is built on the river at the foot of a steep slope. Admiring the winter scene, two men engage in conversation in an upstairs window of the main building. Stretching off into high mountains, a nearby valley contains other structures, including an idle fishing rig with its net in the water. While snowscapes inherently lend themselves to visual drama in their use of contrasting colors and textures, the mood of this painting is still and serene. Architectural elements are crisply realized and skillfully set off against the softening effects of the snow and the light blue-and-green palette.

Although this scroll bears the spurious signature of Li Cheng (919-967), a famous painter of the Five Dynasties period (907-960), the coloring and overall execution of the work, such as the modeling of the rocks and slopes, suggest an artist of the seventeenth-century Nanjing School of painters, and may possibly be a work by the renowned landscapist Fan Qi. Whatever the case, the original artist's signature was cut off at some time and replaced by an unscrupulous individual who wished to attribute the scroll to an earlier era.