Landscape Painting (Shanshui)

This page covers why the genre acquired its status, what its theory claims, how a monumental landscape is constructed, how the tradition changed from describing nature to expressing the painter, and what to look for when you stand in front of one.

Why landscape ranks highest

The ranking is not obvious and needs explaining. In Europe, landscape was a minor genre for centuries, below history painting and portraiture, because it lacked human subject matter and moral content. In China the reasoning ran the other way.

Mountains and rivers were understood as the visible form of the patterns underlying everything, so painting them was engaging with the largest subject available. Reclusion in mountains carried enormous prestige, so a landscape was also a statement about values. And since the genre did not require the technical apparatus of accurate figure drawing, it was well suited to the scholar-amateur, whose preferences shaped the hierarchy.

All three reasons operate together, and the third should not be forgotten. The hierarchy of genres in Chinese painting closely matches what educated amateurs were able to do well.

The theory

The essential text is Guo Xi's essay from the eleventh century, and its central claim is worth stating precisely. A landscape, he says, may be one you can travel through, one you can gaze at, one you can wander in, or one you can live in. The last two are superior to the first two. The purpose of the painting is to allow someone who cannot leave their official duties to have mountains and streams available to them.

This is a functional account. Landscape painting exists because educated people believed they ought to be in the mountains and were not, and the painting substitutes for the experience. That explains a great deal about the genre's conventions, including why a viewer is always given a way in.

Guo Xi also sets out the three distances: high distance, looking up from below at a towering peak; deep distance, looking from the front of the mountain into the space behind it; and level distance, looking across from a near mountain to a far one. These are not perspectives in the geometric sense but organisations of pictorial space, and one painting commonly uses several.

How a monumental landscape is built

The classic Northern Song hanging scroll has a consistent structure once you look for it. At the bottom is a foreground of rocks, a few large trees rendered in detail, perhaps a stream and a path. Above and behind is a middle ground, usually separated from the foreground by water or mist, containing a temple, a village, a bridge, travellers or a boat. Above that rises the main mountain mass, often occupying the upper half of the composition, with waterfalls, subsidiary peaks and distant ranges.

The transitions between these zones are handled by mist and empty silk rather than by continuous ground, which is why the composition can move from close detail to great distance without the jump appearing false.

There is nearly always a path, and it is worth finding. It usually begins at the lower edge, crosses a bridge, disappears behind rocks, and reappears higher up leading toward a building. Following it is how the painting is meant to be read, and it is the practical expression of Guo Xi's idea that a landscape should be somewhere you could walk.

The figures

Human figures in a monumental landscape are tiny, often only a few millimetres, and are easy to miss entirely. Finding them changes the painting.

They are almost never incidental. A scholar seated in a pavilion, a traveller with a staff, a fisherman in a boat, a boy carrying a qin behind his master: each is a recognised type carrying a set of associations about withdrawal, contentment and the proper relation to nature. The disproportion of scale is the point. The tradition is asserting the relative size of human concerns against the world, and doing it visually rather than by argument.

Season, weather and time

Guo Xi describes how mountains change: in spring soft and as if smiling, in summer full of dense green, in autumn clear and sparse as if adorned, in winter withdrawn and as if asleep. Paintings are frequently identified by season, and the season carries mood.

Weather and time of day are handled similarly. Mist, rain, snow and the light before dawn each have conventional treatments, and a painting titled for a specific condition is using an established vocabulary rather than recording a particular observation. Snow landscapes, for instance, are painted by leaving paper white and washing the sky dark, and the result reads as snow because everyone agrees it does.

From description to expression

The most important change in the genre happened between the Song and the Yuan. Song landscape aims to render the structure of the natural world convincingly; the mountains have weight, the rocks have geology, the trees have species.

Yuan landscape does something else. Ni Zan's paintings show a few thin trees, a bare rock, an empty pavilion and a distant shore across water, executed in dry, pale, restrained brushwork, and they are not descriptions of places. They are arrangements of familiar elements whose interest lies in the quality of the brush and in what the sparseness conveys. Ni Zan reportedly said that his bamboo did not need to resemble bamboo, and that he painted to express the untrammelled feeling in his chest.

After this, Chinese landscape painting is largely about painting rather than about landscape. Later painters work in the manner of earlier ones, and a painting's subject is often, in effect, another painting. This is a genuine and deliberate development, and it is also what critics from the seventeenth century onward attacked as sterile repetition.

Learning from nature or from the old masters

The tension between these two is the central argument in later theory. The orthodox position held that one masters the accumulated methods of the past, and that nature is approached through them. The opposing position, argued most forcefully by Shitao in the seventeenth century, held that method should arise from the painter's own encounter with the world, that the ancients' methods were their own solutions and not universal ones, and that one should seek out strange peaks and make drafts of them.

Both positions are more nuanced than their slogans. The orthodox painters did travel and observe; Shitao knew the tradition thoroughly. But the argument is real, and it recurs in every generation including the present one.

Real places and invented ones

Some Chinese landscapes depict identifiable locations, often named in the title, and a tradition of painting famous sites and of illustrating travels does exist. Sets of views of a particular region were popular and function partly as topography.

Most landscapes, however, are constructed. A painter assembles rocks, trees, water and buildings into a coherent whole that resembles no specific place. This is not a failure of observation but a different intention: the painting aims at how mountains are rather than at where a particular mountain is. When a title names a place, it often means that the painting was made for someone connected to it, or in its manner, rather than that it is a record of it.

Landscape and the sacred mountain

Readers coming to this through Taoism will want to know how landscape painting relates to sacred mountains such as Wudang, and the relationship is less direct than might be expected. Painted landscapes are rarely depictions of specific sacred sites, and the pilgrimage tradition produced its own separate visual material: woodblock-printed maps of routes, illustrated gazetteers showing the arrangement of halls, and diagrammatic images used for orientation and devotion.

These are functional images rather than paintings in the literati sense, and they are usually excluded from art histories. They are, however, often the best surviving visual record of what a site looked like, and for Wudang specifically the illustrated mountain gazetteers are more informative than any painting.

Where the traditions do meet is in the shared assumption that mountains are where one goes to be changed. The painter constructing an imaginary mountain and the pilgrim climbing a real one are drawing on the same set of beliefs about what elevation, remoteness and difficulty do to a person. The painting is not a picture of a pilgrimage, but both rest on the same foundation.

Looking at a landscape

Several habits help. Find the path and follow it. Find the figures. Identify the texture strokes and what they say about the terrain and the painter's affiliation. Notice where the empty areas are and what they are doing, since mist and water are usually unpainted.

Look at the trees closely; the treatment of individual trees, especially in the foreground, is where a painter's quality shows most clearly, and the tradition judged tree painting severely. Then step back and look at the whole as an arrangement of masses and voids, ignoring subject matter entirely.

Finally, read the inscription. It often tells you the occasion, the person it was made for, whose manner it follows, and sometimes what the painter thought they were doing, which is information a European painting rarely supplies.

Key points

• The Chinese term means mountain-water, and the subject is the relation between the solid and the flowing rather than scenery generally.
• Guo Xi's theory is functional: painting substitutes for mountains that officials could not reach, which explains why viewers are always given a way in.
• A monumental landscape has foreground, middle ground and mountain mass separated by mist, with a path that the viewer is meant to follow.
• Tiny figures are never incidental; the disproportion of scale is itself the argument.
• Between Song and Yuan the genre shifted from describing nature convincingly to expressing the painter, after which paintings often refer to other paintings.
• Most landscapes are constructed rather than topographic, aiming at how mountains are rather than where a particular mountain is.