Landscape in the Style of Huang Gongwang (1649): Art, History and Details

Landscape in the Style of Huang Gongwang (1649) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gu Tianzhi (Chinese, active mid-1600s).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A sweeping vista of energized mountains, hills, small islands, sand bars, and rivers, this painting retains a simple coherence of ideas and images. Its inspiration comes from Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), the great master of the Yuan dynasty, whose famous Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains has a similar structure, but is much more diverse and varied in its composition. Here, the basic elements of trees, rocks, and hills are repeated in differing scales at varying distances, contributing to the essential rhythm of the painting. Born in Huating (Shanghai), Gu Tianzhi inherited a tradition of painting that was molded under the guiding light of Dong Qichang (1555–1636), an eminent theoretician of the late Ming dynasty and the spokesman for the orthodox heritage that ruled Chinese painting for more than 300 years.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape in the Style of Huang Gongwang
• Date: 1649
• Creator attribution: Gu Tianzhi (Chinese, active mid-1600s)
• Culture: China, late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) - early Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: handscroll; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 25.5 x 717.5 cm (10 1/16 x 282 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1970.3

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pei, Jingfu 裴景福. Zhuang tao ge shu hua lu 壯陶閣書畫錄. Shanghai: Zhonghua shu ju, 1937.
• "New Oriental art galleries at Cleveland." Apollo: A Journal of the Arts. August 1970, Vol. 92, pp. 148–151.
• Cahill, James. The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period. Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1971.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.