The Nymph of the Luo River（left side）

The creator of this painting scroll is believed to be the master painter of Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420), GuiKaizhi (app. 348-409). What we can see today are all duplicates by painters of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and later, as the original work has been lost unfortunately.
The inspiration for the scroll was a prose-poem (fu賦) with the same name written during the Three Kingdoms (220-280) Period by the literary genius Cao Zhi (192-232). This famous poem in the romantic genre uses the dream world to portray the romantic encounter and sorrowful departure between the writer and the Luo River Nymph.
This long narrative scroll employs a “film” format — a series of distinct scenes with text appearing in cartouches at regular intervals. The painter made the two protagonists, Cao Zhi and the Luo River Nymph, appear and reappear in different scenes, depicting their pure love with meticulously brush-stroked twists and turns. The repetitious appearances of a character in one single work seem to be a little illogic, but this reflects the way the ancients enjoyed a painting scroll: opening a part of it and then the next part after finishing the first one. There has been an awareness of setting a timeline in the narrative paintings to tell a complete story among painters since the Wei and Jin Period (265-420) at least as we found in the painting scroll of The Nymph of the Luo River.