(4) Late 18th Century Chinese Paintings on Paper. 

Frame: 20 1/2 x 56 1/4 in. 

Sight: 18 3/4 x 55 1/8 in. 

#4133 . 

Shan shui (translated as “mountain-water”) refers to a style of traditional Chinese painting that involves or depicts scenery or natural landscapes, using a brush and ink rather than more conventional paints. Mountains, rivers, and waterfalls are common subjects of shan shui paintings, hence the name. Shan shui painting first began to develop in the 5th Century in the Liu Song Dynasty. Mountains had long been seen as sacred places in China, viewed as the homes of immortals and thus close to the heavens. Like many other styles of Chinese painting Taoism/Daoism imagery, motifs, and symbolisms strongly influenced Chinese landscape painting, particularly in how minor the human presence is in the vastness of the cosmos. Neo-Confucian interests in the patterns or principles that underlie all natural and social phenomena furthered the style in the 7th Century during the Tang Dynasty. The scope and length of the images, sometimes split into diptychs, triptychs, or greater, emphasizes this, with human figures usually very small and alone, or even completely absent. All shan shui paintings follow rigid sets of requirements regarding balance, composition, and form, with three basic components: Pathways must never be straight and meander like a stream, there is a clearly defined Threshold the path leads to (often the mountain), and the Heart (focal point) of the painting that all elements, paths, and lines lead to defines the meaning of the painting. Most dictionaries and definitions of shan shui assume that the term includes all ancient Chinese paintings with mountain and water images, but contemporary Chinese painters feel that only the paintings that follow those specific conventions should be called “shan shui painting.” Shan shui images are never about real places or objects as they appear in nature, but rather what the artist has thought about nature. While many landscape paintings in China use only ink or color for aesthetic purposes, some shan shui are painted in accordance with Chinese elemental theory, with five elements or phases representing various parts of the natural world connected to specific directions and colors. A certain movement in poetry, influenced by the shan shui style, came to be known as Shanshui poetry, and these poems were often written and designed to be viewed with a specific section of the art, or to invoke an additional image in the reader’s mind.