Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

Rolling hills, sandbanks, and stands of trees unfold across more than six meters of paper in dry, unhurried brushwork, a river landscape meant to be read slowly, hand over hand. Huang Gongwang, eldest of the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty, worked on the scroll for years in his seventies, painting it for a fellow Daoist. In the seventeenth century a collector loved it so much he tried to have it burned with him at death; rescued from the fire, it survives in two unequal pieces, the longer of them among the most revered scrolls in all of Chinese art.