The Awe of the Land
Examining spiritual connections between artists and landscape in two Classical Chinese scroll paintings
Classical Chinese landscape painting began around the time of the artist and poet Wang Wei, during the first half of the eighth-century. He’s known as the innovator responsible for introducing a poetic dimension to landscapes and for originating the discipline of brush and ink painting onto handscrolls, sometimes combining elements of calligraphy. None of his original landscape paintings are known to have survived, though there are a few ‘attributed’ to him and several copies made by other artists. His huge influence, elevating landscape painting from decoration into the realms of poetic art, can be detected in the epic handscrolls and monumental hanging-scrolls, produced over the ensuing four centuries or so. It remains clear in the refined works of early masters, such as Fan K’uan who was working at the close of the tenth-century and into the eleventh (Song Dynasty), and the later ‘Four Great Masters’ — Huang Gongwang, Wú Zhèn, Wáng Méng, and Ni Zan — operating around the turn of the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century (Yuan Dynasty).
Fan K’uan is best remembered for painting the hanging-scroll titled Travellers Among Streams and Mountains (谿山行旅圖). It has been interpreted as a visually expressed philosophical…
