
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

Twelve meters of blue and green mountains, ground from azurite and malachite by a court prodigy said to have died before he was twenty.

More than eight hundred figures crowd five meters of scroll, and Chinese painters have been copying and forging it for nine hundred years.

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.

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.