Clearing Skies over Mount Hua

Located on the eastern end of the Qinling Range in Shaanxi Province, Mount Hua has been venerated since antiquity as one of the Five Sacred Mountains of China. Home to many Daoist temples and monasteries, it was also a favorite destination for poets and painters seeking direct inspiration from nature. Among those was Fan Kuan, a Shaanxi native and one the greatest early masters of monumental landscape painting. A man of strong Daoist inclinations, Fan Kuan is said to have lived for many years among these mountains spending whole days and nights absorbed in deep concentration while seeking to internalize the infinitely variable forms and features of the hills and their changing seasonal appearance. As an artist, Fan Kuan was attracted to the dramatic aspects of nature and intrigued by the tactile surfaces of things, such as rocks and trees, as well as by the underlying "bone structure" of massive geological forms.

With its strongly contoured mountains delineated in bold, powerful outlines, its harsh granite surfaces textured with distinctive dabs of ink known as "sesame seed" or "rain drop" dots, with its large rocks vigorously protruding from the edge of the foreground water, and its tiny human figures and precisely drawn houses and temples, this unsigned painting conforms in all particulars to the stylistic conventions of the Fan Kuan tradition and may preserve an earlier lost composition. It was probably created a few decades before 1340 when a Yuan dynasty viewer inscribed his name at lower left.

To learn more about this and similar objects, visit http://www.asia.si.edu/SongYuan/default.asp Song and Yuan Dynasty Painting and Calligraphy.