Fan Kuan
Template:Short description Template:Family name hatnote Template:Infobox artist Fan Zhongzheng (c. 960 – c. 1030),<ref name="SchirokauerBrown2012"/><ref name="ebrey 162"/> courtesy name Zhongli, better known by his pseudonym Fan Kuan (Template:Zh), was a Chinese landscape painter of the Song dynasty. He was both a Daoist and a Neo-Confucianist.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref>
Travelers among Mountains and Streams, a large hanging scroll, is Fan Kuan's best known work, possibly his only surviving one,<ref name=":0" /> and a seminal painting of the Northern Song school. It establishes an ideal in monumental landscape painting to which later painters were to return time and again for inspiration.<ref>Sullivan, The Arts of China, 179.</ref> The classic Chinese perspective of three planes is evident - near, middle (represented by water and mist), and far. Unlike earlier examples of Chinese landscape art, the grandeur of nature is the main theme, rather than merely providing a backdrop.<ref name="SchirokauerBrown2012">Template:Cite book</ref> A packhorse train can barely be seen emerging from a wood at the base of a towering precipice. The painting's style encompasses archaic conventions dating back to the Tang dynasty.<ref name="ReferenceA">Sullivan, The Arts of China, 180.</ref>
The historian Patricia Ebrey explains her view on the painting that the:
...foreground, presented at eye level, is executed in crisp, well-defined brush strokes. Jutting boulders, tough scrub trees, a mule train on the road, and a temple in the forest on the cliff are all vividly depicted. There is a suitable break between the foreground and the towering central peak behind, which is treated as if it were a backdrop, suspended and fitted into a slot behind the foreground. There are human figures in this scene, but it is easy to imagine them overpowered by the magnitude and mystery of their surroundings.<ref>Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History of China, 162–163.</ref>
Fan's masterpiece Travellers among Mountains and Streams bears a lost half-hidden signature rediscovered only in 1958.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>
See also
Notes
References
- Liu, Pingheng (1989). Shui mo yin yun, qi yun sheng dong de Zhongguo hui hua (水墨絪縕, 氣韻生動的中國繪畫) = Misty and Lively Chinese Painting. Taibei Shi: Guo li li shi bo wu guan (Template:Lang).
- Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
External links
- Painting Gallery of Fan Kuan at China Online Museum
- Other paintings by Fan Kuan at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Template:Webarchive
- Fan Kuan, A Bilingual Study of His Life & Works (English & Chinese)
- Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717), an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Fan Kuan (see index)