Thatched cottage in an autumn grove

Viewers in Gao Cen’s time would have recognized this painting as following the classic composition of Ni Zan (1306–1374), in which a stand of trees sheltering a thatched cottage is separated from a distant shore by a blank expanse of paper. They would also have noted Gao’s strikingly modern update of this formula: the heightened sense of spatial depth, which he achieved by making objects smaller from front to back in a systematic way. Nanjing painters of the later seventeenth century showed a profound interest in effects of this type; some scholars have seen this as a sign of their familiarity with European art, while others have suggested it was inspired by a renewed engagement with the realism of Northern Song landscape painting.