Swallow Rock

Gong Xian, a secular disciple of the preeminent Dhyana Master Juelang Daosheng, often signed his works with variant names of his native town of Kunshan, Jiangsu province. A champion of adhering to the tradition, modelling on nature and especially learning from the Song and Yuan masters, Gong looked upon Dong Yuan and Monk Juran as the patriarchs of landscape painting. Under the influence of Nanjing and Anhui painters such as Zhang Feng, Yang Wencong and Li Liufang in the late Ming and early Qing, his early works are chiefly marked by simply outlined mountains.
This took a turn for dynamism achieved through repeated dotting and washing in the so-called accumulating-ink technique that the painter developed in his fifties by breaking through the confines of tradition and modelling on nature. This also coincided with his most prolific and defining period which is characterized by eclecticism, majesty and vigor.

The present painting is striking in its contrast between the sparse right and the dense left. On the right are houses standing on a sloping shore to face a pavilion across the water. To the left of this transitional section is an intricate tapestry comprising a waterfall, a bridge and cottages nestling in a wood, the dark tones of which are affected by superimposed washes. The scene captured here is believed to be the Swallow Rock in Nanjing, which is referred to by its old name in the self-composed poem at the end of the scroll and was a place which the painter frequented and often described in his poems. In order that the scene can fit into a horizontally extending composition, Gong Xian has relocated the waterside pavilion, mountains and river such that the depiction does not dovetail with that in a woodblock print faithfully made by the late Ming painter Zhu Zhifan. On the grounds that the horizontal setting and the depiction of the trees are similar to those in his 1674 painting A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines, the present specimen is dated to the painter’s middle years when he was already in seclusion in Mount Qingliang.