Travelers Among Mountains and Streams

Fan Kuan, a Daoist recluse who lived in the mountains of Shaanxi around the year one thousand, said he preferred to learn from nature rather than from other painters. Look at the surface of the cliff, built from thousands of small dark dots and short strokes that scholars call raindrop texture, which give the rock its weight and roughness. The trees on the summit are drawn one by one. The mist that separates the mountain from the foreground is simply unpainted silk, yet it makes the peak float and creates a sense of enormous distance. The composition is a hierarchy: heaven, mountain, and at the bottom the small business of humans.

The painting is usually described as the greatest of all Chinese landscapes and it has shaped the way Chinese artists saw mountains for a thousand years. Fan Kuan's signature, hidden among the leaves in the lower right, was only discovered in nineteen fifty eight by a museum curator. The scroll is so fragile that the museum shows it only for a few weeks every few years, and when it appears people queue for hours. If it is not on view, the museum's collection of Song landscapes in the same galleries will show you the tradition it founded.

Did You Know? The artist's signature was lost for centuries because he hid it among the leaves of a tree, where a curator finally spotted it in nineteen fifty eight.