A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains

A handscroll nearly twelve meters long, unrolling range after range of mountains in brilliant mineral blues and greens, azurite and malachite ground into pigment over ink. Wang Ximeng painted it in his teens, a prodigy trained at the court academy of Emperor Huizong, and is said to have died soon after, before he was twenty. It is the grandest surviving example of the 'blue-and-green' manner, an archaic, jewel-like style the Song court revived. A panorama meant to be travelled through by eye, section by unrolling section.