After Huang Jucai’s Autumn Mountains

明代年丁椎抔繪縘愽居寀秋山圖紙本痓綎
Ding Yunpeng spent much of his career in Songjiang where he practiced Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhism at a local monastery and made the acquaintance of local scholars. He is best known as a painter of religious figures. Dong Qichang (see his hanging scroll in this gallery), the great art theorist of the period and a leading member of the Songjiang literati, admired Ding Yunpeng's work and wrote many complimentary inscriptions on them.
This landscape belongs to an early stage of Ding Yunpeng's career and shows strong influences from the active painting movements in Songjiang. These movements encouraged an appreciation of the past. In this interpretation of a painting by Huang Jucai (933–approx. 993), Ding refers to several earlier traditions with his use of scalloped clouds, folding rock forms, and the palette of blue and green. , Ding Yunpeng is best known as a painter of religious figures and blue-and-green landscapes. He spent much of his career in the Jiang and Zhe regions where he practiced Chan Buddhism at a local monastery and made the acquaintance of local scholars. This elaborate landscape belongs to an early stage of his career and shows strong influences from the past and a revival of the classical blue-and-green landscape style. By imitating the celebrated style of Huang Jucai (approx. 933–993), Ding references several earlier traditions with his archaistic recreation of scalloped clouds, folding rock forms, and the palette of blue and green, illustrating colorful autumn mountains inhabited by Daoist immortals.