Wangchuan Villa
Unidentified artist
In the Style of Guo Zhongshu
Not on view
The eighth-century poet and painter Wang Wei was so taken with the beauty of his country estate that he decided to celebrate it with a cycle of twenty poems extolling various sites on the property and a painted handscroll that depicted the grounds. The poems have been part of the core curriculum for students of Chinese literature for a millennium, and although the original painting was lost long ago, its composition has survived in the form of rubbings and painted copies. This example merges the naive architectural forms of the original composition with the elegant painterly sensibility of the sixteenth-century followers of Wen Zhengming (1470–1559).
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