Early Spring
1072 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
Guo Xi was court painter to the Song emperor and worked from a theory of three distances, shifting the eye between peak, valley and horizon.
★ 8.3
The Art canon
Sourced and hung.
Every work chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
Travelers Among Mountains and Streams
1000 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
A wall of rock fills two-thirds of the picture and shrinks the mule train below to nothing. Fan Kuan hid his signature in the leaves.
★ 8.7
Along the River During the Qingming Festival
1120 · Palace Museum, Beijing
More than eight hundred figures crowd five meters of scroll, and Chinese painters have been copying and forging it for nine hundred years.
★ 9.2
A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains
1113 · Palace Museum, Beijing
Twelve meters of blue and green mountains, ground from azurite and malachite by a court prodigy said to have died before he was twenty.
★ 9.3