Travelers Among Mountains and Streams

Fan Kuan (ca. 950-1031) was a well-known landscape painter of the early Song Dynasty (960-1279). It is said that, “Kuan,” meaning broadness and tolerance in Chinese, is not Fan’s original name, but an alias given by others because of his tolerant temperament.

This painting applied the panoramic image composition which prevailed in the painting of the Northern Song Dynasty. The towering mountain ridges in the distance occupy two thirds of the entire image, creating a sense of grandeur that would usually engendered by monuments. The clouds and fogs swirling from distant mountains lead attention of viewers to the rocks and dense woods in the foreground. A caravan carrying goods is travelling along the zigzag mountainous trails in the lower right corner of the painting. In spite of small sizes, the characters and carriages were illustrated meticulously, which stand as a sharp contrast with the roughly drawn outlines of ridges in the distance. The painter thus endowed a sense of spaciousness to the work.

On most of the extant works of great masters in the early history of Chinese painting, there are still doubts in terms of the original creator and the time when the work was done. This painting, however, has been unanimously recognized as a genuine work by Fan Kuan, thanks to the sense of magnificence which is a unique feature of the early Song paintings, more importantly, the sound proof, an ingeniously hidden signature formed by seemingly scattering leafs in the woods behind the caravan in the lower right corner of the painting. Viewers need to observe very carefully so as to recognize the two characters of Fan Kuan.