Wooded hills and mountains fill most of the format, with houses and a village nestled along the river shore and in a valley. The forms are described by outlines in thick, ropey brushstrokes and interior texturing to suggest the orientation and flow of the natural forms. Much of the aesthetic approach seen here, including the brushwork, the abstract construction of the forms, and the Y-configuration found on the faces of some of the rocks, can indeed by traced back to the Yuan dynasty master Huang Gongwang (1269-1354), mentioned here in the inscription as the inspiration for the painting.
The 17th-century in China can be thought of as the age of the calligrapher, and here this is manifested by the material used for the painting. Under the influence of such calligraphers as Dong Qichang (1555-1636), artists began to write and paint on such non-traditional materials as satin, various kinds of figured silks, and, as here, paper with gold applied.
Shen Hong, zi Yuanzhu (“Primal Islet”), hao Yuanzhu (“Distant Islet”), was born in Lou-xian, the modern Songjiang in Jiangsu province. His birth and death dates are not recorded in standard biographical sources but his dated paintings demark a period of activity lasting from 1661 until 1706. His earliest biography, in the Tuhui baojian xuzuan of about 1680, records him as one of four contemporaneous Songjiang artists who “excel in painting landscapes.”1 His style was said to have been based on that of Shen Zhou (1427-1509), a distant predecessor working in the same general geographic area, while other sources note a similarity with the works of Wang Hui (1632-1717), his famous contemporary.
This work presents Shen as an extremely competent painter, one able to create convincing illusions of sold form on the flat surface and then to organize these structures in such a way as to convey a sense of pictorial recession from near to far ground. Passages of well-drawn mountains are articulated by the addition of architectural forms and people, with the whole suggesting a complete and satisfying universe within which nothing untoward could occur.
1. Tuhui baojian xuzuan, huashi zongshu edition, vol. 2, p. 909.
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