富春山居图 Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

Fuchun River 富春江 is located in the middle of Zhejiang Province. The sceneries on both sides of the Fuchun river are very beautiful and charming. There are clean river water, magnificent mountains, local natural villages and so on. These fantastic views were painted by Huang GongWang 黄公望, one of the most famous Chinese ShanShui landscape painting artists, between 1348 and 1350.

Huang GongWang was a magistrate when he was young. He was imprisoned for a while and became a taoist after he was released. Realising the beauty of magnificent mountains and winding rivers, he was fond of Chinese natural landscape. He started to specialising in ShanShui landscape painting and developed his unique art style. In order to draw the Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains perfectly, Huang spent seven years only for the preparation work. He would go to the Fuchun river to observe a gradual change of clouds and developed a special interest in angling. With a thorough understanding of the landscape, he started to bring Xuan paper and brushes to paint on site. Undoubtedly, with such deep understanding and familiarity of the FuChun River, Huang GongWang was able to complete such a wonderful piece of art work.

 

Painted on Xuan Paper, the painting is created based on the Fuchun river’s early autumn scenery. Nearly 80 percent of the painting is landscape of TongLu 桐庐 while 20 percent of Fuyang 富阳. The whole painting was divided into six parts. The first three parts are vivid and lively. The sky is full of mist; the forest casted large shades of leaves under sunshine; the small boats flutter slowly; fishermen look at the river peacefully. The remaining three parts are an ocean of distant sceneries. Apart from this, there is a lot of blank space, which added more imagination for the painting. Huang made full use of the Chinese traditional techniques which allow for differences in intensity and shade of colour creating high light and contrast.

 

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains was divided into two parts. The first part The Remaining Mountain 剩山图 is 31.8 * 51.4 cm and is currently kept in the Zhejiang Museum 浙江博物馆, and the other part The Master Wuyong Scroll 无用师卷  33 * 636.9 cm is kept in the National Palace Museum in Taipei 台北故宫博物院. Although the painting was completed almost 7 centuries ago, it is still very inspiring and functions as a textbook for young artists.

 

Click here for the The Remaining Mountain 剩山图 part;

Click here for the The Master Wuyong Scroll 无用师卷 part.