Landscapes with Poems

This painting is a part of Landscapes with Poems, an artwork by Chinese artist Gong Xian. It depicts a quiet landscape of a house on the hills by the water, accompanied by a written inscription on the top left. Four trees are illustrated in the foreground, with the branches of one of the trees slightly obscuring the house, creating a sense of mystery. For the hills, Gong uses a process known as “jimo”, or layered ink. This process involves applying multiple layers of ink while letting each layer dry in between, thus creating texture and a sense of depth through the overlapping. The tree leaves and the grass growing on the hills are illustrated with dotted brushstrokes, which results in both density and translucency. The water next to the house is intentionally left blank, creating the illusion of the hills floating on water – an element that is typical in Gong’s artworks. The artist, Gong Xian, is a painter who lived from the late Ming to early Qing dynasty, and was a leading painter in the seventeenth century Nanjing school. While he started with studying previous painting traditions from the early Northern Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, he eventually developed his own artstyle. Gong is considered a leading individualist artist during the period he lived in, with Landscapes with Poems serving as a showcase of his unique style in painting.