Travelers Among Mountains and Streams

A sheer wall of rock fills the upper two-thirds of the silk, a thin white waterfall dropping from its flank, while at the bottom edge a mule train and two tiny drivers thread along a path, dwarfed almost to nothing. Fan Kuan, a Daoist recluse of the Northern Song, paints the mountain not as scenery but as a living presence, built from dense, raindrop-like strokes that give the stone its grain. Long held to be the supreme monument of Chinese landscape painting, the scroll hid its maker's signature among the leaves at lower right, found only in the twentieth century.