Dong Yuan (, Gan: dung3 ngion4; c. 934 – c. 962) was a Chinese

painter Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

. He was born in Zhongling (钟陵; present-day Jinxian County,

Jiangxi ; Gan: ) , translit_lang1_type2 = , translit_lang1_info2 = , translit_lang1_type3 = , translit_lang1_info3 = , image_map = Jiangxi in China (+all claims hatched).svg , mapsize = 275px , map_caption = Location ...

Province).Cihai: Page 599. Dong Yuan was active in the Southern Tang Kingdom of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. He was from

Nanjing Nanjing or Nanking is the capital of Jiangsu, a province in East China. The city, which is located in the southwestern corner of the province, has 11 districts, an administrative area of , and a population of 9,423,400. Situated in the Yang ...

, which was a center for culture and the arts. He was known for both figure and

landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes th ...

paintings, and exemplified the elegant style which would become the standard for brush painting in China for the next nine centuries. He and his pupil Juran () were the founders of the Southern style of landscape painting, known as the Jiangnan Landscape style. Together with Jing Hao and Guan Tong of the Northern style they constituted the four seminal painters of that time. As with many artists in China, his profession was as an official, here he studied the existing styles of Li Sixun and Wang Wei. However, he added to these masters' techniques; he included more sophisticated perspective.

Works

The ''Xiao and Xiang Rivers'' or ''Scenes along the Xiao and Xiang Rivers'', a painting on silk (49.80 cm by 141.30 cm), is one of his best-known masterpieces. It demonstrates his exquisite techniques, and his sense of composition. The clouds break the background mountains into a central pyramid composition and a secondary pyramid, by softening the mountain line, he makes the immobile effect more pronounced. The inlet by breaking the landscape into groups makes the serenity of the foreground more pronounced, instead of simply being a border to the composition, it is a space of its own, into which the boat on the far right intrudes, even though it is tiny compared to the mountains. Left of center, he uses his unusual brush stroke techniques, later copied in countless paintings, to give a strong sense of foliage to the trees, which contrasts with the rounded waves of stone that make up the mountains themselves. This gives the painting a more distinct middle ground, and makes the mountains have an aura and distance which gives them greater grandeur and personality. He also used "face like" patterns in the mountain on the right. A painting attributed to Dong Yuan, ''The Riverbank'', is housed in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

, and was a gift from New York financier Oscar Tang, though some scholars believe it may be a modern forgery by Zhang Daqian.

Gallery

Notes

References

*Ci hai bian ji wei yuan hui (). Ci hai (). Shanghai: Shanghai ci shu chu ban she (), 1979.

External links

Dong Yuan and his painting gallery
at China Online Museum
Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717)
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Dong Yuan (see index)
"Riverbank", painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dong Yuan 930s births 962 deaths Year of birth uncertain Southern Tang painters Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms landscape painters People from Nanchang Painters from Jiangxi 10th-century Chinese painters

Works

Gallery

See also

Notes

References

External links