The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Special Exhibitions: Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings

Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings

		清龔賢山水圖冊 Gong Xian (1619–1689) Landscapes and Trees, ca. 1679 Album of twelve paintings; ink on paper; 6 1/4 x 7 9/16 in. (15.9 x 19.1 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, From the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Family Collection, Gift of Wen and Constance Fong in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Dillon, 1979 (1979.499)

By the mid-1670s Gong Xian's confidence as a painter had taught him to avoid an overly skillful or popular style. He wrote: "Nowadays when people paint they do only what appeals to the common eye; I alone do not seek to please the present." In this album, both paintings and inscriptions attest to Gong's striving after a spiritual communion with earlier masters while creating a pictorial vocabulary all his own. Departing from his densely textured, monumental landscape style of the 1660s, Gong moved toward a sparser manner in which each brushstroke is made to function calligraphically as well as descriptively, embodying both expressive and representational meaning. The album's format—paintings accompanied by art-historical comments—reminds us that Gong Xian taught painting for a living.