Snow landscape

At lower right, a winter traveler, leading a pair of horses and followed by a servant carrying loaded shoulder poles, crosses a small bridge to a village way station. Supported on pilings along sheer vertical cliffs, a snow-covered road of wooden planks continues at left and then reappears higher and higher above the plunging abyss until reaching a gateway in a notch of the mountains at upper right. Groups of travelers ascent single file on this narrow perilous track, while high above, heavy covered wagons inch slowly along. A stand of oversize pine trees leads the viewer's eye up a twisting series of craggy rdiges to a thrusting central peak. The underlying geology of the central resembles the sinuous form of an enormous dragon with an immense misshapen head bellowing into the leaden winter sky. The monumental scroll bears a small, spurious signature of the Tang dynasty artist and poet Wang Wei, to whom numerous depictions of similar scenes are credited in early catalogues. In fact, though the composition may preserve cetain features of a lost work from the Northern Song (960-1127), the delicate brushwork on the trees and mountains is characteristic of a style that only became formally identifies with Wang Wei in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.