Description
Li Gongnian served as a prison official in the southern city of Hangzhou. During the reign of Emperor Huizong (reigned 1100–1126), the Xuanhe huapu imperial painting catalogue described Li Gongnian's paintings as being "like the shapes of objects appearing and disappearing in vast emptiness, hovering between existence and nothingness." This painting of mountains in a landscape filled with clouds and mist is the sole surviving authenticated work by him; it is signed and sealed on the rock outcrop beneath an overhanging cliff at the right.
Winter Landscape offers an important link between the monumental landscape style of the Northern Song and the intimacy of the Southern Song (1127–1279). In technique, the stipple strokes used on the mountains are a simplified version of the "raindrop" modeling strokes of the Northern Song painter Fan Kuan (ca. 960–1030). The foreground trees and rocks recall the tradition of "dragon's claw" branches and "devil's face" rocks associated with Li Cheng (919–967) and Guo Xi (ca. 1010–1090). The distant hills dissolved in soft and misty ink clearly anticipate Southern Song styles. Lyricism was a key note in landscape paintings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and this winter landscape with a faint celestial orb in the upper right evokes the poetic line: "a winter sun slowly emerges through the mist."
Published References & Reproductions
George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting (1st ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pl. 24; (2nd ed., 1959), pl. 19.
Asia House Gallery, The Art of Southern Sung China, text and catalogue by James Cahill (New York: Asia House, 1962), p. 19, illus.
Suzuki Kei entry in Chūgoku bijutsu (Chinese Art) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973), vol 1., no. 5, p. 219 (illus. in color).
Suzuki Kei entry in Suiboku bijutsu taikei (Compendium of Ink Painting) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974–78), vol. 2, pl. 7, p. 156.
Bunjinga suihen (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1977), Vol. 2: Dong Yuan and Ju Ran, pl. 34, p. 41, and p. 219 (text).
Ogawa Hiromitsu entry in Sekai no bijutsu (The Art of the World) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1980), vol. 94, color illus., p. 92.
Sofukawa Hiroshi entry in Chūgoku no bijutsu (The Art of China) (Kyoto: Tankosha, 1982), vol. 3, pl. 51, p. 185–6.
Suzuki Kei, comp., Chūgoku kaiga sōgō zuroku: daiikkan, Amerika-Kanada hen (Comprehensive illustrated catalogue of Chinese paintings: vol. 1, American and Canadian collections) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1982), pl. A16-012.
Wen C. Fong, et al., Images of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 54–55, fig. 51.
Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University (Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), illus. p. 204.
Chinese Art in Overseas Collections: Painting (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1986), p. 26, fig. 23.
Ogawa Hiromitsu entry in Chūgoku sansuiga hyakusen (One Hundred Chinese Landscapes) (1994).
Cary Y. Liu, "Asian Art Collection: From Exotica to Art and History," Record of The Art Museum, Princeton University 55, nos. 1–2 (1996), p. 130, fig. 9.
Ellen Johnston Laing, "Qiu Ying's Late Landscapes," Orientations XLIII (1997:1), p. 35, fig. 13.
Yolaine Escande, "Des véhicules du sublime das le paysage chinois," in Le Paysage et la question du sublime (Musée de Valence, 1997), p. 174, illus. 16.
Ogawa Hiromitsu article in Bijutsushi ronso (Studies in Art History) 13 (1997), p. 9, 34, fig. 48.
Takenami Toru entry in Sekai bijutsu daizenshu (Compendium of World Art) (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1998), vol. 5, pl. 44, p. 360.
Cary Y. Liu and Dora C.Y. Ching, eds., Arts of the Sung and Yüan: Ritual, Ethnicity, and Style in Painting (Princeton 1999), p. 6 (illus).
