Travelling in Autumn Mountains: Landscape in the style of Guo Xi (Kuo Hsi)

Description

It is common in Chinese ink painting to create works in dialogue with past masters. Although the artist of this work is unknown, the dark jagged edges of the pine trees and rounded looming mountaintops recall the style of master painter Guo Xi and his famous work Clearing Autumn Skies over Mountains and Valleys in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art. Active in the Northern Song Period (960–1217), Guo Xi was passionate about the need for painters to be in communion with nature in order to truly represent space and changing phenomena. He is most famous for his treatise on landscape painting entitled Great Message on the Forests and Rivers. In it, he writes:
“Wherein lies the reason that good men so much love landscapes? It is because amid orchards and hills a man has ever room to cultivate his natural bent… haze and mists, saints and faeries—for these man’s nature pines eternally, and pines in vain. Now comes a painter, and by his skill all these things are suddenly brought to us. Still in our home, stretched on the divan, we hear the cry of gibbons by many streams, the song of birds down many valleys; while our eyes are flooded by the gleam of hills, the hues of falling streams.”
(Chinese Gallery Rotation, Fall 2010)
Gallery Rotation Fall 2010
Traveling in Autumn Mountains: Landscape
in the style of Guo Xi
China, Ming Period (1368–1644)
16th century
Hanging scroll, ink on silk
Gift of Dorothy Dunlap Cahill, 2002/2.354
It is common in Chinese ink painting to create works in dialogue with past masters. Although the artist of this work is unknown, the dark jagged edges of the pine trees and rounded looming mountaintops recall the style of master painter Guo Xi and his famous work Clearing Autumn Skies over Mountains and Valleys in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art. Active in the Northern Song Period (960–1217), Guo Xi was passionate about the need for painters to be in communion with nature in order to truly represent space and changing phenomena. He is most famous for his treatise on landscape painting entitled Great Message on the Forests and Rivers. In it, he writes:
“Wherein lies the reason that good men so much love landscapes? It is because amid orchards and hills a man has ever room to cultivate his natural bent… haze and mists, saints and faeries—for these man’s nature pines eternally, and pines in vain. Now comes a painter, and by his skill all these things are suddenly brought to us. Still in our home, stretched on the divan, we hear the cry of gibbons by many streams, the song of birds down many valleys; while our eyes are flooded by the gleam of hills, the hues of falling streams.”