Enjoying the Wilderness in an Autumn Grove

Enjoying the wilderness in and Autumn Grove is a famous Chinese landscape painting made in 1339 by the scholar and artist Ni-Zan during Yuan dynasty it is a vertical hanging scroll created with black ink on paper. The painting is split into 2 parts with a large body of water in the middle which is left black to create a feeling of open space, in front there is a group of tall and thin trees with autumn leaves right next to the trees sits a straw roof hut, inside it there is a person surrounded by books and tools looking at the calming landscape in the far background there are hills rising above the water . Ni-Zan used a dry brush technique with thin, delicate ink stokes to pain the trees and the land making the scene feel quiet and calm at the top of the scroll Ni-Zan wrote a poem and a short message explaining how he painted it the poem translates to: " How I delight in autumn, both the inkstone and mat cool; With the bamboo shade rolled up, a fine dew on my robe. Forest gate and cave mouth bring forth fresh pleasures; Green rain and yellow mist enclose my remote bed. In the bright days, bamboo wave in the breeze; In the dark nights, parasols of fir hold up the moon. Burning incense I use [a censer in the form of] a gilded duck; Gathering scattered petals I place them inside my pillow." In the introduction note before the poem Ni-Zan explains that after her finished painting for his friend Xiaoshan ,his friend brought it back to him in autumn to ask for an inscription . Ni-Zan then decided to write a poem he recently composed after seeing the cassia trees blooming outside his studio he signed off at the end of the text saying :"on the fourteenth day of the ninth lunar month of jimao year(October 16,1339) , Yunlinsheng, Ni-Zan over the next hundred years later the collectors and artists stamped their red seal and wrote their own notes directly on the paper , showing how the painting traveled through different hands before it reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.