Winter in the Mountains (Dong jing shanshui)
Description
Wang E was a favored court painter during the Ming dynasty, and it is even said that the Hongzhi emperor (r. 1487–1505) called him the "Ma Yuan (Southern Song master; act. ca. 1190–1264) of the Ming." In this way, by officially sanctioning the fifteenth-century revival of Southern Song brush idioms, the Ming emperors symbolically represented themselves as the legitimate heirs of the imperial mandate.
In this painting, the axe-cut (fupi) ink-wash brush method was used for modeling the rocks—a technique preferred by professional painters. In contrast, scholar painters emphasized calligraphic brushwork, which usually utilized the brush tip to produce more rounded, three-dimensional, and expressive lines. This difference in painting technique reflects a basic divergence between the approaches by the professional and scholar painters. The former treated painting more as pictorial design, while the latter used it as a form of artistic self expression combining the disciplines of calligraphy, poetry, and painting.
