Fan Zhongzheng (c. 960 – c. 1030),[3][1] courtesy name Zhongli, better known by his pseudonym Fan Kuan (Chinese: 范寬; pinyin: Fàn Kuān; Wade–Giles: Fan K’uan), was a Chinese landscape painter of the Song dynasty.

Fan Kuan
Travelers among Mountains and Streams (谿山行旅), ink and slight color on silk, dimensions of 6¾ ft x 2½ ft.[1] National Palace Museum, Taipei[2]
Born	c. 960 Hua-yuan (Today: Yaozhou District), Shaanxi Province
Died	c. 1030
Nationality	Chinese
Known for	Landscapes
Movement	Northern Landscape style

Travelers among Mountains and Streams, a large hanging scroll, is Fan Kuan's best known work and a seminal painting of the Northern Song school. It establishes an ideal in monumental landscape painting to which later painters were to return time and again for inspiration.[4] The classic Chinese perspective of three planes is evident - near, middle (represented by water and mist), and far. Unlike earlier examples of Chinese landscape art, the grandeur of nature is the main theme, rather than merely providing a backdrop.[3] A packhorse train can barely be seen emerging from a wood at the base of a towering precipice. The painting's style encompasses archaic conventions dating back to the Tang Dynasty.[5]

The historian Patricia Ebrey explains her view on the painting that the:

...foreground, presented at eye level, is executed in crisp, well-defined brush strokes. Jutting boulders, tough scrub trees, a mule train on the road, and a temple in the forest on the cliff are all vividly depicted. There is a suitable break between the foreground and the towering central peak behind, which is treated as if it were a backdrop, suspended and fitted into a slot behind the foreground. There are human figures in this scene, but it is easy to imagine them overpowered by the magnitude and mystery of their surroundings.[6]

Fan's masterpiece Travellers among Mountains and Streams bears a lost half-hidden signature rediscovered only in 1958.[5]

See also

• Culture of the Song Dynasty
• Chinese Painting
• Chinese art
• History of Chinese art

Notes

References

• Liu, Pingheng (1989). Shui mo yin yun, qi yun sheng dong de Zhongguo hui hua (水墨絪縕, 氣韻生動的中國繪畫) = Misty and Lively Chinese Painting. Taibei Shi: Guo li li shi bo wu guan (國立歷史博物館).
• Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fan Kuan.

• Painting Gallery of Fan Kuan at China Online Museum
• Other paintings by Fan Kuan at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Fan Kuan, A Bilingual Study of His Life & Works (English & Chinese)
• 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 Fan Kuan (see index)

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[ru] Фань Куань