Dong Yuan (,
Gan
The word Gan or the initials GAN may refer to:
Places
*Gan, a component of Hebrew placenames literally meaning "garden"
China
* Gan River (Jiangxi)
* Gan River (Inner Mongolia),
* Gan County, in Jiangxi province
* Gansu, abbreviated ''Gā ...
: dung3 ngion4; c. 934 – c. 962) was a Chinese
painter
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...
.
He was born in Zhongling (钟陵; present-day
Jinxian County
Jinxian County () is a county of Jiangxi Province, China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with ...
,
Jiangxi
Jiangxi (; ; formerly romanized as Kiangsi or Chianghsi) is a landlocked province in the east of the People's Republic of China. Its major cities include Nanchang and Jiujiang. Spanning from the banks of the Yangtze river in the north int ...
Province).
[Cihai: Page 599.] Dong Yuan was active in the
Southern Tang
Southern Tang () was a state in Southern China that existed during Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, which proclaimed itself to be the successor of the former Tang dynasty. The capital was located at Nanjing in present-day Jiangsu Province ...
Kingdom of the
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (), from 907 to 979, was an era of political upheaval and division in 10th-century Imperial China. Five dynastic states quickly succeeded one another in the Central Plain, and more than a dozen conc ...
. He was from
Nanjing
Nanjing (; , Mandarin pronunciation: ), alternately romanized as Nanking, is the capital of Jiangsu province of the People's Republic of China. It is a sub-provincial city, a megacity, and the second largest city in the East China region. T ...
, which was a center for culture and the arts.
He was known for both figure and
landscape
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...
paintings, and exemplified the elegant style which would become the standard for brush painting in China for the next nine centuries. He and his pupil
Juran () were the founders of the Southern style of landscape painting, known as the Jiangnan Landscape style. Together with
Jing Hao
Jing Hao (, also known as Hongguzi) (c. 855–915) was a Chinese landscape painter and art theorist of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in Northern China. As an artist, he is often cited along with his pupil, Guan Tong, as one of the ...
and
Guan Tong
Guan Tong () (c. 906-960) was a Chinese painter of the Northern Landscape style during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period and early Song dynasty from the city of Chang'an.''中国绘画全集'', Vol 2, p. 6. He was a pupil of Jing Hao, an ...
of the Northern style they constituted the four seminal painters of that time.
As with many artists in China, his profession was as an official, here he studied the existing styles of Li Sixun and
Wang Wei. However, he added to these masters' techniques; he included more sophisticated perspective.
Works
The ''Xiao and Xiang Rivers'' or ''Scenes along the Xiao and Xiang Rivers'', a painting on silk (49.80 cm by 141.30 cm), is one of his best-known masterpieces. It demonstrates his exquisite techniques, and his sense of composition. The clouds break the background mountains into a central pyramid composition and a secondary pyramid, by softening the mountain line, he makes the immobile effect more pronounced.
The inlet by breaking the landscape into groups makes the serenity of the foreground more pronounced, instead of simply being a border to the composition, it is a space of its own, into which the boat on the far right intrudes, even though it is tiny compared to the mountains. Left of center, he uses his unusual brush stroke techniques, later copied in countless paintings, to give a strong sense of foliage to the trees, which contrasts with the rounded waves of stone that make up the mountains themselves. This gives the painting a more distinct middle ground, and makes the mountains have an aura and distance which gives them greater grandeur and personality. He also used "face like" patterns in the mountain on the right. A painting attributed to Dong Yuan, ''The Riverbank'', is housed in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
, and was a gift from New York financier
Oscar Tang
Oscar Liu-Chien Tang () is a Chinese-born American financier who co-founded Reich & Tang, an asset management firm. Tang was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Prior to this, he was appointed to the New York Sta ...
,
though some scholars believe it may be a modern forgery by
Zhang Daqian
Chang Dai-chien or Zhang Daqian (; 10 May 1899 – 2 April 1983) was one of the best-known and most prodigious Chinese artists of the twentieth century. Originally known as a '' guohua'' (traditionalist) painter, by the 1960s he was also renowned ...
.
Gallery
See also
*
Culture of the Song Dynasty
The Song dynasty (960–1279 AD) was a culturally rich and sophisticated age for China. It saw great advancements in the visual arts, music, literature, and philosophy. Officials of the ruling bureaucracy, who underwent a strict and extensive exa ...
*
Chinese painting
Chinese painting () is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. Painting in the traditional style is known today in Chinese as ''guó huà'' (), meaning "national painting" or "native painting", as opposed to Western style ...
*
Chinese art
Chinese art is visual art that originated in or is practiced in China, Greater China or by Chinese artists. Art created by Chinese residing outside of China can also be considered a part of Chinese art when it is based in or draws on Chinese ...
*
Eight Views of Xiaoxiang
The ''Eight Views of Xiaoxiang'' () are scenes of the Xiaoxiang region, in what is now modern Hunan Province, China, that were the subject of the poems and depicted in well-known drawings and paintings from the time of the Song Dynasty. The ''Ei ...
*
History of Chinese art
Chinese art is visual art that originated in or is practiced in China, Greater China or by Chinese artists. Art created by Chinese residing outside of China can also be considered a part of Chinese art when it is based in or draws on Chinese c ...
*
Xiaoxiang
Xiaoxiang (), also transliterated ''XiaoXiang'', ''Hsiao Hsiang'', and ''Chiu Chiang'', in some older sources, refers to the "lakes and rivers" region in south-central China south of the middle-reaches of the Yangtze River and corresponding, more ...
*
Xiaoxiang poetry
Xiaoxiang poetry is one of the Classical Chinese poetry genres, one which has been practiced for over a thousand years. It is a poetry of scenic wonders, a poetry of officials exiled for their views and beliefs, and a poetry of dissent against sub ...
Notes
References
*Ci hai bian ji wei yuan hui (). Ci hai (). Shanghai: Shanghai ci shu chu ban she (), 1979.
External links
Dong Yuan and his painting galleryat China Online Museum
Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Dong Yuan (see index)
"Riverbank", painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dong Yuan
930s births
962 deaths
Year of birth uncertain
Southern Tang painters
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms landscape painters
People from Nanchang
Painters from Jiangxi
10th-century Chinese painters