Early Spring

Mountains seem to breathe and dissolve in mist, their forms twisting upward like slow smoke as the first thaw loosens the winter land - streams run, travelers stir, fishermen return. Guo Xi, court painter to the Song emperor Shenzong, built the scene from his theory of the 'three distances,' shifting the eye between high peaks, deep valleys, and level horizons within a single view. His son later gathered his teachings into the essay The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams, which held that a great landscape should be one a viewer could wander into and live. Dated 1072, it is his finest surviving work.