Northern landscape style
Description
The northern landscape style (Chinese: 北宗画; pinyin: běi zōng huà) was a manner of Chinese landscape painting centered on a loose group of artists who worked and lived in Northern China during the Five Dynasties period that occupied the time between the collapse of the Tang dynasty and the rise of the Song. The style stands in opposition to the Southern School of Chinese painting.
This style, in retrospect, focuses around the development of a distinct tradition of landscape painting in China. At the beginning of this brief period there was no clear image of how landscape painting would be realised. At its end there existed an idea of a national style. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Jing Hao
Pioneering Five Dynasties master who founded the Northern landscape tradition and wrote 'Bifa Ji' (Notes on Brushwork), elevating monumental mountain landscapes to moral philosophy.
Guan Tong
Pupil of Jing Hao who propagated and refined the Northern style during the Five Dynasties period with rugged, austere mountain formations.
Li Cheng
Early Northern Song master whose dramatic high-mountain compositions, cold winter woods, and 'crab-claw' brushwork formed the foundational Li-Guo school.
Fan Kuan
Legendary Northern Song master who spent years living as a recluse in the Qilian Mountains to capture the overwhelming majesty of towering granite peaks and dense forests.
Guo Xi
Northern Song court painter under Emperor Shenzong whose treatise 'Lofty Message of Forests and Streams' and concept of 'angle of totality' defined classical Song academic landscape.
Xu Daoning
Northern Song landscape painter who began as a pharmacy seller drawing trees for customers, noted for dynamic handscrolls depicting vast, sheer river valleys.
Famous Artworks
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Fun Facts
For over nine centuries, Fan Kuan's signature on 'Travelers among Mountains and Streams' was believed lost until 1958, when scholar Li Lin-tsan discovered his name hidden among the painted foliage of the lower right forest.
↗ Source: en.wikipedia.org
Guo Xi articulated the famous principle of 'three distances' (sanyuan) in landscape painting: high distance (looking up at towering peaks), deep distance (looking beyond valleys), and level distance (looking across expansive plains).
↗ Source: en.wikipedia.org