As a part of the background of the characters, mountains, animals, forests and birds are completely and truly combined. The rocks began to show different faces in line changes, different mountain changes in layers, and vertical and horizontal mountains and rivers in a downward view. The above is the basic expression of landscape painting. Although this kind of performance is still in its infancy, it has laid a solid foundation for the future development of China landscape painting. Therefore, Gu Kaizhi's name is not only associated with the historical development of figure painting in China, but also contributed to the development of landscape painting in China.
During the Southern and Northern Dynasties after Gu Kaizhi, landscape painting rose rapidly, and a group of painters who could draw landscape painting and the first batch of papers devoted to landscape painting appeared. But so far, we haven't found a landscape painting handed down at that time. We can only understand the development level of landscape painting in China at that time according to the literature about landscape painting at that time. However, since then, the art of landscape painting has entered the China painting world with relatively complete expression and systematic theory.
China's landscape paintings developed greatly in Sui and Tang Dynasties. The works of painters represented by Zhan Ziqian in Sui Dynasty provide us with important materials for studying the landscape paintings of this period. Zhan Ziqian is a native of Shandong today. He was a doctor in the Northern Qi, Northern Zhou and Sui Dynasties. He is a generalist in painting. It is said that he is proficient in figures, landscapes, boundary paintings and horses and chariots. Known as the "ancestor of Tang painting" by the world. But his most outstanding contribution is landscape painting, and his only work that has been handed down to this day is You Chuntu, which is now kept in the Palace Museum.
You Chuntu is a green landscape painting depicting natural scenery, which shows people's outing in spring. With proper management, meticulous brushwork and gorgeous colors, the painter painted a beautiful spring scenery with green mountains and green waters, lush flowers and trees, beautiful mountains and clear waters, and gorgeous high-rise yachts rippling with the waves on the sparkling lake. The three women on board looked around, intoxicated by the beautiful lakes and mountains, and lingered. A few people by the lake are riding horses, strolling along mountain paths, or standing on the shore with their hands outstretched, full of interest. Through vivid descriptions of various natural scenery and people's activities, the painter successfully embodied the theme of spring outing, and the pious You Chuntu paved the way for the formation of the green landscape painting school in Tang Dynasty.
Father and son in Tang Dynasty directly inherited Zhan's landscape painting style. Li Sixun was an imperial clan in the Tang Dynasty and once served as "General Wuwei". He inherited Jing and developed Zhan Ziqian's painting method, with neat brushwork, firm and steady fish, magnificent picture patterns, magnificent momentum and strong decoration. He inherited his painting style in Li Zhaodao, and was called "the trend of changing his father, wonderful", creating seascapes and landscapes.
In this way, from Zhan Ziqian in Sui Dynasty to Li Sixun and his son in Tang Dynasty, China formed a distinctive school of green landscape painting. In the Tang dynasty, another source of landscape painting school was formed, that is, ink landscape painting.
The founder of ink and wash landscape painting is Wang Wei. It is said that he is good at poetry, calligraphy, painting and music, and he was also a senior minister. Wang Wei's paintings include snow scenes, Jiange, plank roads, hiking and fishing. His paintings are characterized by exquisite brushwork and delicate rendering, which are "heavy" and "deep". Another important feature of Wang Wei's landscape painting is the organic combination of poetry and painting. As we mentioned before, the history of painting generally regards him as the founder of the combination of poetry and painting. In the middle and late Tang Dynasty after Wang Wei, there appeared a "ink painting movement" in the development of landscape painting. In this way, China landscape painting developed into a free new world in the Tang Dynasty.
From the Five Dynasties to the Song Dynasty, landscape painters came forth in large numbers, and the schools of landscape painting overlapped. These painters inherited and developed the excellent traditions of landscape painters in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties, and pushed China's landscape painting to an unprecedented peak, forming the landscape paintings of the Northern School and the Southern School in the Five Dynasties, the Central Plains Painting School and the Courtyard Landscape Painting in the Northern Song Dynasty, the Midian Landscape and the Green Landscape in the Late Northern Song Dynasty, and the Courtyard Landscape Painting in the Southern Song Dynasty.
During the Five Dynasties, Hao Jing and his student Guan Tong were representatives of northern landscape painting. Hao Jing, a northerner, once lived in seclusion in Taihang Mountain and was exposed to the magnificent scenery of the mountains in the north and Taihang Mountain. The painted landscape "starts from the peak and overlooks the poor valley" is mostly a huge valley with a panoramic layout centered on the regular layout, while the main peak is the center and the white clouds are used to set off the overall layout of the middle and foreground. The scene is grand, magnificent and has a strong sense of space. It is said that Kuang Lu Tu is his masterpiece. His disciple Guan Tong is from Chang 'an, who studied under Hao Jing, but he has the reputation of "taking care of you" and is a family of his own. He likes the scenery around Guanhe Shaanxi, where the autumn mountains are cold and the villages are desolate. His masterpiece "Travel Map of Guanshan" has been handed down from generation to generation, with towering peaks and far-reaching charm. The painted trees are flourishing and idle, giving people the impression that they are "messy and whole, simple and interesting".
Corresponding to the Northern Landscape Painting School represented by Hao Jing and Guan Tong, there is the Jiangnan Painting School represented by Dong Yuan and his disciple Ju Ran in the south, also known as the "Southern Landscape Painting School". Dong Yuan and Ju Ran were both painters who were active in the south in the second half of the 20th century. They live in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, different from the lonely, rich and cold north, but in a mild, sunny, warm and humid area. They observe nature and describe it with unique artistic language. In Dong Yuan's works, it is difficult to see steep peaks. What he saw were gentle and continuous mountains, endless streams at the foot of trees, fishing houses in mountain villages, and moving scenery in the mountains and rivers of the south of the Yangtze River. Dong Yuan's representative works include Xiaoxiang Map, which depicts the scenery of Xiaoxiang area, and Summer Mountain Map, which depicts the scenery of Jiangnan in summer. Ju Ran, a disciple of Dong Yuan, became the best successor of his painting style, and his masterpiece is Tween in Autumn Mountain. In this painting, three hermits are talking about Buddhist scriptures in a hut beside a stream in a deep valley jungle, surrounded by autumn scenery in Gao Shuang, which can also reflect the identity and intention of the painter.
During the Northern Song Dynasty, the Central Plains Painting School and Academy Landscape Painting appeared. The Central Plains Painting School is represented by Li Cheng and Fan Kuan. Li Chuangshi lives in Yingqiu County, Shandong Province, so he often describes the natural environment of Qilu and Yuan Ye. Fan Kuan has lived in Zhong Nanshan and Dahuashan for a long time. His paintings are rich in mountains, abrupt in stones and lush in trees. After Li Cheng and Fan Kuan, landscape painters followed. Under the influence of Li and Fan, there is a tendency that "the people of Qilu only imitate Li Cheng, and the land of Guanshan only imitates Fan Kuan".
After the unification of the Northern Song Dynasty, painters from the south of the Yangtze River went north one after another and were treated by the Northern Song Dynasty Painting Academy, which impacted the Northern Song Dynasty landscape painting with the Central Plains painting school as the mainstream, and the northern and southern painting schools began to merge, forming a courtyard landscape painting represented by Guo.
In the Northern Song Dynasty landscape painting, we should also mention "Midian Landscape" and "Green Landscape". The founder of Midian Landscape is Mifei. He is one of the four great calligraphers in the Northern Song Dynasty. Originally from Taiyuan, Shanxi, he moved to Xiangyang, Zhenjiang and other places. Inspired by the misty rain scene of Yunshan smoke trees that can often be seen along the Yangtze River, he made a new creation in landscape painting techniques, and used ink to draw landscapes, giving full play to the integration of ink and wash. The effect of ink smudge has formed a subtle and ethereal charm.
Then there are green mountains and green waters. As mentioned above, this school of painting has been formed from Zhan Ziqian in Sui Dynasty to Li Sixun and his son in Tang Dynasty. However, in the Five Dynasties and the early Song Dynasty, this form was not popular among literati and painters, and was regarded as the work of professional painters, which was once suppressed in the Northern Song Dynasty. In the mid-Northern Song Dynasty, some painters pushed their way through the crowd and plunged into the green landscape again, creating exquisite green landscape paintings suitable for the court to enjoy. Turquoise landscape painting has entered a mature stage, and famous representative painters include Wang Ximeng and Zhao Boju.
The northern nationalities invaded and the Song Dynasty moved south, which was called the Southern Song Dynasty. Southern Song Dynasty Painting Academy was established in the new capital Lin 'an. Due to the political changes and the northward movement of the painter's living area, the painting art in the Southern Song Dynasty has undergone new changes in content and style, and the garden landscape paintings in the Southern Song Dynasty, represented by Li Tang, Liu Songnian, Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, have appeared.
Garden landscape painting in the Southern Song Dynasty is obviously different from that in the Northern Song Dynasty. They abandoned the alpine torrent composition and fine and complicated pen and ink centered on the main peak since the Northern Song Dynasty, and innovated in a simple and simple form. Diagonal composition is often made by comparing the distance between two diagonals, so that the center of gravity of the picture deviates from the center and is located in half the corner. Known as the "corner and a half" artistic realm.
The Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty were the times when painters came forth in large numbers and painting schools were numerous, but we still have to talk about another paid painting style-literati painting. Literati painting rose in the early Northern Song Dynasty. Su Shi first mentioned the concept of "literati painting", which refers to the painting of literati who are different from folk painters and court painters. Its main feature is that it advocates expressing the author's subjective interest. Based on flowers and birds, bamboo stones, water waves, smoke clouds, borrowing things to suggest that avoiding reality is empty; In the creative method, it is not bound by the program, and in the artistic form, it emphasizes the combination of poetry, calligraphy, painting and printing. The rise of literati painting promoted the development of landscape painting and flower-and-bird painting in China. In the field of landscape painting, through the artistic pursuit and practice of "Yuan Sijia", this painting style became the dominant painting style after the Song Dynasty.
"Yuan Sijia" refers to the four most famous landscape painters in Yuan Dynasty: Huang, Wang Meng, Ni Zan and Zhenwu. The four schools are all good at poetry and calligraphy, and the combination of poetry, calligraphy and seal has become an art form they adopted. They all emphasize the expression of individuality, the entertainment of painting and the interest of pen and ink. However, the four schools have different experiences, artistic preferences and aesthetic ideals, and each has its own distinct personality. Huang's paintings only use two specifications, light crimson and ink. The brushwork is changeable and stable, and the pen is light and vigorous, reducing stimulation and pursuing peace and harmony.
Wang Meng's paintings are rich in appearance, some are good at writing, some win with ink, and some compete for color. The most obvious difference is that the three are very simple, but Wang Meng is numerous. What about Ni Zan? The outstanding features of his landscape paintings are simplicity, dryness and lightness, that is, simple composition, pen and ink, simple image and dry pen and ink. Then Zhenwu, the most prominent thing is that the other three companies attach great importance to pens, while Zhenwu attaches great importance to ink and likes to use wet pens. The effect of the picture is gloomy and moist, but it retains the legacy of more people.
Finally, let's take a look at Ming and Qing landscape paintings.
Except for a few painters, most landscape paintings in Ming and Qing dynasties mainly imitate ancient times, highlighting the interest of pen and ink. For example, in the early Ming dynasty, the painting circles mainly advocated the style of the Southern Song Dynasty Painting Academy and the Zhejiang School. But after that, I made a breakthrough in painting. They emphasize subjective beauty.
Combining the strengths of various factions, the techniques are flexible and changeable, and the composition no longer follows the traditional subordinate format, and is freely arranged, emphasizing the interest of life. Shen Zhou, Wen Zhiming, Tang Yin and Chou Ying in the middle of Ming Dynasty made great achievements in landscape painting. Why is it called Wumeng? Because all four of them are from Suzhou, Suzhou was nicknamed "Wumen", hence its name.
Shen Zhou combined the strengths of Dong Yuan, Ju Ran, Mi Fei, Zhenwu, Wang Meng and other predecessors to create a variety of styles of landscape paintings, some fine, some simple, some magnificent, some beautiful and elegant. There are panoramic mountains and rivers, small and idyllic scenery. Simple technique, full of life meaning. His landscape paintings have been handed down from generation to generation, such as "Lushan Mountain High Map" and "Cangzhou Interesting Map Volume". Wen Zhiming is a student in Shenyang, and of course he is also his hometown. He studied under Shen Zhou and was good at poetry, calligraphy and painting. His landscape paintings have two specifications: meticulous painting and freehand brushwork, freehand brushwork of ink and landscape, freehand brushwork and splash ink. Meticulous landscape, but not rigid, has a typical bookish spirit and "literati" interest. Tang Yin's paintings are self-contained, adopting the methods of Li Cheng, Fan Kuan and the Southern Song Dynasty, as well as those of Yuan people. The scene of the work is grand, the technique is rigorous, it is gloomy and leisurely, and it is weird and graceful, which is rich and generous. Chou Ying is a painter, not a "literati", but he is influenced by both literati painters and folk painters in art, so his paintings combine these two aspects and are appreciated by literati, which has an artistic interest of appealing to both refined and popular tastes.
After the four schools of Wumen, the landscape painting circle in Ming Dynasty began to be crowded with factions, which was as lively as the painting circle in Song Dynasty. The larger factions are Hua Tingpai, Susong and Yun Jian, among which Hua Tingpai has the greatest influence. Because these three schools belong to the same area (Songjiang), their aesthetic concepts and painting styles are basically the same, so people collectively call them "Songjiang School".
The landscape painting altar with numerous factions in the late Ming Dynasty is also very distinctive in the Qing Dynasty. The so-called "orthodox school" and "innovative school" appeared, which have always influenced the atmosphere of the whole painting circle in Qing Dynasty.
Qing Dynasty is an important period in the history of China fine arts. There have been new changes in the artistic thoughts, creative attitudes and artistic styles within the literati system, which are also accompanied by changes in political ideology and culture at that time. Due to the closed-door policy and cultural autocracy of the Qing rulers, they tried their best to consolidate the small-scale peasant economy and suppress commodity production, which made the capitalist factors grow continuously since the middle of Ming Dynasty, broke through the traditional ideological trend of liberation in art, lost the hotbed of development, and all-round revivalism and asceticism prevailed.
In this context, the field of painting began to regress and mutate. This is represented by the "six masters in the early Qing Dynasty", who emphasize "copying the ancients day by day" and "looking like the ancients" in art, divorced from reality and clinging to the line of pen and ink skills of predecessors. Learning from the ancients has become a major tendency of their landscape painting creation. This kind of artistic opinion and style can cater to the ideological restraint policy of the Qing Dynasty and the aesthetic taste of the literati at that time, which is very supported and appreciated by the government and is regarded as the so-called "orthodoxy".
On the 6th day of Qing Dynasty, everyone was headed by Wang Shimin, and the rest were Wang Jian, Wang Yi, Wang, Yun, all of whom seemed to be related to Yu Shimin. Wang Yi and He Yun are both students in Wang Shimin, Wang Jian is his fellow countryman and relative, and Wang is his grandson. Maybe it's this family relationship. At the same time, Wang Shimin, Wang Jian, Wang Yi and Wang are also called the "Four Heavenly Kings" in painting. They all advocate copying ancient times and creating with copying income. Their extraordinary brushwork and deep skill have made landscape painting a big step forward in technique. But later, Yun gave up mountains and rivers and found another way to specialize in flowers, which made him famous for a while.
When the "orthodoxy" represented by the Sixth National Congress embarked on the road of retro-ism, a group of Han intellectual painters with strong national consciousness and creative spirit began to inherit the trend of liberation that broke through the tradition after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, dared to break through and come forward in art, emphasized the liberation of individuality, advocated "borrowing the past to create the present", opposed complacency, and used and transformed traditional painting forms to express their true feelings about life. In the history of painting, these people are generally called "reformists", and the representatives of this school are the famous "four famous monks" and "Jinling Eight Schools" in the early Qing Dynasty.
"Four Famous Monks" refer to Shi Tao (Yuanji), Xi Shi (Kun Can), Hong Ren and Badashan people. The characteristic of the four of them is that they all became monks because they hated the Manchu rule, and they used painting to avoid the mountains and express their anger. They all oppose copying the past and advocate natural creation. Show true feelings. But their paintings have their own characteristics: Shi Tao's paintings are fantastic and detached; Xi Shi's paintings are simple and elegant; Hong Ren's paintings are simple and quiet; Badashanren's paintings are concise and clear. Their painting style has a great influence on the "Eight Eccentrics in Yangzhou" in flower-and-bird painting.
Gong Xian is the leader of the "Eight Jinling Families", and ranks alongside Fan Yin, Gao Cen, Zou Zhe, Wu Hong, Ye Xin, Hu Mao and Xie Xun. They got their name because they all grew up in Nanjing. Their characteristic is that they are not influenced by the wind of learning from the past, but get inspiration from real life experience and nature, and their works are more realistic. Most of them live in seclusion, wandering between Jianghuai and selling paintings for a living. At the same time, they often get together, sing songs about wine, and sing with poetry and calligraphy. The painting styles of "Four Great Monks" and "Eight Sons of Jinling" had a far-reaching influence on the later development of China landscape painting.