River and landscape

This landscape painting was made by Huang Yue, a prominent official from Anhui Province who earned his jinshi degree in 1790, during the final years of the long reign of the Qianlong emperor. This work was painted in 1825, under the Qianlong emperor’s grandson Daoguang, in the final year of Huang Yue’s three and a half decades’ service to the throne, during which he was appointed to the highly prestigious South Studio (Nanshufang), as one of the emperor’s most intimate advisers.

Working primarily in ink of medium tones with strategic accents of dark black, Huang described a dense landscape of piled rocks doted here and there with simple buildings.

Near the left edge of the handscroll, the artist inscribed a heptasyllabic quatrain:

Twisting pines coil with hoary mist,
Foliage so dense that it blocks winter’s bite.
My guest discourses on the Yellow Court [a Daoist scripture],
Its abstruse principles bring forth pure subtleties.

In the second month of the yiyou year (1825), I painted this in response to a painting by Wang Meng for Grand Censor Lianfeng [Xu Baoshan (1790–1838)].

Zuotian, the retired old man Yue, aged 76.

盤松纏綠煙，
密葉掩寒峭。
有客講黃庭，
真機發清妙。
道光乙酉（1825年）二月仿王叔明本，為廉峰太史屬。
左田退叟鉞時年七十有六。