Dwelling In The Fuchun Mountains 富春山居图

Overview

Chinese Name: 富春山居图
English Name: Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
Year: Yung Dynasty 元代
Artist: Huang Gongwang 黄公望
Dimensions: 31.8 × 51.4 cm (The Remaining Mountain) ，33 × 636.9 cm (The Master Wuyong Scroll)

Brief Introduction

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains 富春山居图 is an ink painting on paper created by the Yuan Dynasty 元朝 painter Huang Gongwang 黄公望 in 1350. Huang Gongwang was painted by his younger brother Zheng Chu 郑樗, and the painting was parted in two paragraphs because of “burning for burial”.

The first half volume: Remaining Mountains 剩山图, now in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum; the second half volume: The Useless Teacher Volume无用师卷, now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains 富春山居图 is one of the Top 10 Chinese Paintings 中国十大传世名画.

What is worth appreciating about this painting？

The meaningful and deep Themes

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains depicts a long river that has flowed through shoals, rapids, and peaks in a thousand-year history.

Huang Gongwang turned the pain of subjugation that had been accumulated for decades into open-mindedness and restored it to the landscape： Regardless of the rise and fall of the dynasty, just come back and be yourself,

When Huang Gongwang was in his 80s and walked on the Fuchun River, he also felt that the rise and fall of dynasties was not the most important thing, but whether there could be “Verdurous mountains in the distance, chaos in the clouds.”

There are also the images of fishermen, woodcutters and scholars in the painting, who live in seclusion in the mountains and forests and forget about the rivers and lakes.

The structured composition

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains adopts a horizontal scroll, according to people’s normal vision, to construct the landscape scenery on the same level, is a kind of composition continuously extending from the plane. Huang Gongwang made a hierarchical design of the landscape. The front and back of the mountain are arranged from near to far, which gives an effective connection between the front and back scenes in the way of composition.

Huang Gongwang adopted a wide way to achieve the transformation of painting composition. Between heaven and earth, all the scenes constitute an organic whole, showing the real sense of space in the blank place, which also highlights the characteristics of the place without painting is also a kind of beauty..

The Painting Techniques

In landscape painting, Huang Gongwang adopted a painting technique from the near to the far, with a very clear layer analysis, showing the broad meaning of the picture, leaving a broader space for the viewer to think.

Huang Gongwang adopts the traditional brushwork of literati painting to express the scroll.
In the paintings, mostly dry lines are used for expression. Thick ink and wet ink can only be seen in the depiction of trees. This is the so-called dry and moist feature, which is both casual and soft. The whole painting presents a picture with rich changes in rhythm.

The Artist of the painting

Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), birth name Lu Jian 陆坚, was Chinese painter, poet, and writer born at the end of the Song dynasty 宋朝 in Changshu, Jiangsu.

Huang Gongwang rejected the landscape conventions of his era’s Academy, is regarded as one of the great literati painters now . One of Huang Gongwang’s strongest influences was his technique of using very dry brush strokes together with light ink washes to build up landscape paintings.

Huang Gongwang also wrote a treatise on landscape painting, Secrets of Landscape Painting 山水诀. As was typical for Chinese scholar-officials of his era, he also wrote poetry and had some talent for music.