DONG YUAN / 董源 (c. 934 – c. 962)
Dongtian Mountain Hall / 洞天山堂图 (0 - No elevation data)
China
In Dongtian Mountain Hall / 洞天山堂图 - Mountains of the Immortals, ink on silk roll
National Palace Museum, Taipei
About the Painting
This is one of his most well-known landscapes. His stylistic renderings of the natural world would be hugely influential on Chinese painting, and came to be known as the Jiangnan (named for a culture center in the south, literally "south of river") style. His most distinctive technique is the usage of pointillism and cross-hatching in a remarkable way that had not previously been explored, as traditional Chinese painting materials encourage broad, sweeping brush strokes in a similar manner to calligraphy. This would be imitated by thousands.
The artist
Dong Yuan / 董源 (c. 934 – c. 962) was a Chinese painter. He was born in Zhongling (钟陵; present-day Jinxian County, Jiangxi Province). Dong Yuan was active in the Southern Tang Kingdom of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. He was from Nanjing, which was a center for culture and the arts. He was known for both figure and landscape paintings, and exemplified the elegant style which would become the standard for brush painting in China for the next nine centuries. He and his pupil Juran (巨然) were the founders of the Southern style of landscape painting, known as the Jiangnan Landscape style. Together with Jing Hao and Guan Tong of the Northern style they constituted the four seminal painters of that time.
As with many artists in China, his profession was as an official, here he studied the existing styles of Li Sixun and Wang Wei. However, he added to these masters' techniques; he included more sophisticated perspective.
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2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
