Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains - AbsoluteAstronomy.com


Technique	Wash painting
Support	Paper Paper Paper is a thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon, drawing or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets.... (scroll)
Dimension	31.8 × 51.4 cm (The Remaining Mountain) 33 × 639.9 cm (The Master Wuyong Scroll)

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (富春山居圖) is the magnum opus and one of the few surviving works by the painter

Chinese painting

Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. The earliest paintings were not representational but ornamental; they consisted of patterns or designs rather than pictures. Early pottery was painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals...

Huang Gongwang

Huáng Gōngwàng was a painter born during the late Song Dynasty in Changshu, Jiangsu. He is the oldest of the "four great masters of the Yuan." After serving as an official he acted as a Taoist priest. He spent his last years in the Fu-ch'un mountains near Hangzhou devoting himself to Taoism. It...

(1269–1354). Painted between 1348 and 1350, the Chinese landscape painting was burnt into two pieces in 1650. Today, one piece is kept in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum

Zhejiang Provincial Museum

The Zhejiang Provincial Museum is a major museum of Chinese art located near the West Lake in Hangzhou, China. It was first established in 1929, and now houses over 100,000 items in its permanent collection.-External links:*...

in Hangzhou

Hangzhou

Hangzhou , formerly transliterated as Hangchow, is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China. Governed as a sub-provincial city, and as of 2010, its entire administrative division or prefecture had a registered population of 8.7 million people...

, while the other piece is kept in the National Palace Museum

National Palace Museum

The National Palace Museum is an art museum in Taipei. It is the national museum of the Republic of China, and has a permanent collection of over 677,687 pieces of ancient Chinese artifacts and artworks, making it one of the largest in the world. The collection encompasses over 8,000 years of...

in Taipei

Taipei

Taipei City is the capital of the Republic of China and the central city of the largest metropolitan area of Taiwan. Situated at the northern tip of the island, Taipei is located on the Tamsui River, and is about 25 km southwest of Keelung, its port on the Pacific Ocean...

. The entire painting combined would measure 691.3 cm in length.

Huang Gongwang and Fuchun Mountains

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is considered one of the greatest surviving masterpieces by the highly acclaimed Chinese painter

Chinese painting

Huang Gongwang (1269–1354). He began serious studies in painting only at the age of 50. In 1347, he moved to the Fuchun Mountains (southwest of Hangzhou

Hangzhou

, along the northern bank of the Fuchun River), where he spent the last years of his life. There he made a number of paintings on the natural landscape, among them Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.

Beginnings

Huang Gongwang

began work on the painting in 1348 and took about three years to complete it. He presented it to a Taoist

Taoism

Taoism refers to a philosophical or religious tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony with the Tao , which is the mechanism of everything that exists...

priest as a gift in 1350. A century later, the painting was somehow acquired by the Ming Dynasty

Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...

painter

Chinese painting

Shen Zhou

Shen Zhou , courtesy name Qinan , was a Chinese painter in the Ming dynasty.-Life:Shen Zhou was born into a wealthy family in Xiangcheng, near the thriving city of Suzhou, in the Jiangsu province, China...

(1427–1509). During the reign of the Chenghua Emperor

Chenghua Emperor

The Chenghua Emperor was Emperor of the Ming dynasty in China, between 1464 and 1487. His era name means "Accomplished change".-Childhood:Born Zhu Jianshen, he was the Zhengtong Emperor's son. He was only 2 years old when his father, the Zhengtong emperor, was captured by the Oirat Mongols and...

(1465–1487), Shen Zhou sent the painting to an unnamed calligrapher to be inscribed (a curious point considering Shen Zhou was an excellent calligrapher himself). However, the son of this calligrapher seized the painting which, after a few changes of hands, reemerged on the market being sold at a high price. Unable to afford the price, there was nothing Shen Zhou could do except to make a copy of the painting himself. This imitation by Shen Zhou has become the most well-known and acclaimed among all others.

Not long after he made the copy, Shen Zhou gave it to a bureaucrat friend named Fan Shunju (樊舜举). Fan Shunju then began to search for the authentic copy. When he found it, he bought it at a hefty price and invited Shen Zhou to inscribe on it. Shen Zhou then noted down at the end of the scroll the story of how the painting was lost and found.

Over the following centuries, the painting had come to know several owners, including Tan Zhiyi (谈志伊), Dong Qichang

Dong Qichang

Dong Qichang , courtesy name Xuanzai , was a Chinese painter, scholar, calligrapher, and art theorist of the later period of the Ming Dynasty.-Painter:...

(董其昌) and Wu Zhengzhi (吴正志). When Wu Zhengzhi died, he passed the painting to his third son Wu Hongyu (吴洪裕), who loved the painting so much that when he went on refuge, he left behind all valuables and only brought the painting and a copy of the Thousand Character Classic
Thousand Character Classic
The Thousand Character Classic is a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children. It contains exactly one thousand unique characters. It is said that Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty commissioned 周興嗣 to compose this poem for his prince to practice calligraphy...

by Master Zhiyong (智永法师). In fact, he was so fond of these two pieces of work that he had them burnt shortly before he died, so that he could bring them to the afterlife.

One into two

Fortunately, Wu Hongyu's nephew Wu Jing'an rescued the painting, which was however already aflame and torn into two. The smaller piece, measuring slightly more than half a meter, was subsequently known as The Remaining Mountain (剩山圖). After passing through the hands of numerous collectors, it came to the possession of Wu Hufan (吴湖帆), painter and collector, during the 1940s. In 1956, it finally settled down in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum

Zhejiang Provincial Museum

in Hangzhou

Hangzhou

.

The journey of the major portion, known as The Master Wuyong Scroll (無用師卷), was perhaps more dramatic. It passed through the hands of several high-level government officials, including Gao Shiqi (高士奇) and Wang Hongxu (王鸿绪), before landing in the Imperial Palace

Forbidden City

The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the middle of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum...

. Ironically, the Qianlong Emperor

Qianlong Emperor

The Qianlong Emperor was the sixth emperor of the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty, and the fourth Qing emperor to rule over China proper. The fourth son of the Yongzheng Emperor, he reigned officially from 11 October 1735 to 8 February 1796...

, who prided himself in his connoisseurship, judged that this new acquisition was counterfeit and insisted that the imitation he already possessed was authentic. This mistake was only corrected in 1816, during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor

Jiaqing Emperor

The Jiaqing Emperor was the seventh emperor of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, and the fifth Qing emperor to rule over China, from 1796 to 1820....

. The longer piece was taken to Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

during the 1950s and is now at the National Palace Museum

National Palace Museum

in Taipei

Taipei

Joined after three and half centuries

In 2011, the shorter piece was loaned to the National Palace Museum in Taipei where, in June and July, the two pieces were reunited for the first time since their separation more than three and a half centuries ago.

Miscellaneous

A number of private condominium
Condominium
A condominium, or condo, is the form of housing tenure and other real property where a specified part of a piece of real estate is individually owned while use of and access to common facilities in the piece such as hallways, heating system, elevators, exterior areas is executed under legal rights...

s in China are named Fuchun Mountains Residence after the painting.

External links

"Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains" by Huang Gongwang and Shen Zhou at China Online Museum
Record of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum website (in Simplified Chinese)

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