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Mountain Landscape
Zhe School, Ming dynasty, mid-16th century
Ink and light color on paper
Margery Hoffman Smith Fund
86.56

Deep in the mountains, an elegant, tile-roofed pavilion projects out over a stream from a rocky promontory. Inside, three scholar-gentlemen are engrossed in a game of chess, while two attendants converse in an adjoining room and a solitary figure reads a book upstairs. On the other side of the promontory, other scholar-gentlemen approach the pavilion across a zigzag bridge. The scene is a variation on a time-honored theme in Chinese painting: friends gathering in a sylvan setting to converse and enjoy refined pursuits amid the sounds of running water and wind-blown trees. A life of cultivated leisure, unsullied by worldly concerns, was for centuries one of the most cherished ideals of China’s educated elite.

The mountains rising behind the pavilion are an expression of an even more venerable theme in Chinese painting, that of the mountain as a symbol of the forces of nature. Indeed, the theme is so central to traditional landscape painting in China that the very word for landscape in Chinese is shansui, literally “mountain [and] water.”

This painting is a late example of the work of the so-called Zhe school, which drew its style and subject matter from Song dynasty prototypes. The influence of such Southern Song masters as Xia Gui and Ma Yuan is particularly evident in the broad, dark “axe-cut” brushstrokes used to shape the rocks in the foreground.