Chinese Landscape Painting

In China, landscape painting was the most admired kind of painting for a thousand years. Its Chinese name, shan shui, means "mountain-water." Its great age began under the Song dynasty (960 to 1279), when painters made huge hanging scrolls of towering mountains in ink on silk. They were not painted on the spot: a painter walked and looked for years, then built an ideal landscape from memory and imagination.

Chinese paintings come in formats you hold and unroll. A hanging scroll is tall and hung on a wall for a time. A handscroll is long and low; you unroll it on a table, an arm's length at a time, from right to left. Owners and later collectors added poems and red seals to the painting itself, so a scroll records its own history.

Looking closely: Travelers among Mountains and Streams. A huge cliff fills the top two-thirds of the scroll, rising straight up like a wall, its surface built of thousands of small dry brush dots and strokes, like raindrops, that give the rock its texture. A thin waterfall drops down its right side. Mist separates the mountain from the hills below, so we cannot tell how far back it is. At the bottom, tiny travelers drive a train of mules along a path beside a stream. Their smallness makes the mountain immense. In 1958 a scholar found the painter's signature hidden among the leaves at the lower right.

Looking closely: Early Spring. Signed and dated by the artist, this scroll shows mountains twisting upward in an S, half lost in spring mist. Trees with crab-claw branches cling to the rocks, and small figures, boats and buildings appear in the valleys if you look closely. The forms blur and sharpen as if fog were moving through them.

Zhang Zeduan's handscroll, more than five meters long, follows a river from the countryside into a busy city, with over 800 people: boatmen, shopkeepers, travelers. Scholars debate its exact date and even which city it shows, though most place it in the Northern Song capital, Kaifeng.