The limitations and shortcomings of landscape painting in Song Dynasty should also be discussed, and the problems in Song Dynasty were overcome in Yuan Dynasty.

The common feature of landscape painting in Song Dynasty is that, like flower-and-bird and figure painting at that time, it emphasizes learning from nature and is more realistic.

Landscape painting in Song Dynasty shows the painter's exploration of painting theory and method of nature. Through natural changes, he can see through social changes and pay attention to people's position in the landscape. He often takes talking about Taoism, visiting friends, seclusion and amusement as the theme, and expresses his feelings for mountains and rivers with the help of Shan Jutu and travel maps, showing his pursuit of life ideals and interests. The snow scene, cold forest and travel notes of Li Cheng and Fan Kuan created the eternal theme of China's landscape painting. Guo, Xu Daoning, Mi Fei and Mi Youren also have their own characteristics, which pushed the landscape painting of the Northern Song Dynasty to a historical peak.

The landscape painting in the Southern Song Dynasty is very different from that in the Northern Song Dynasty, because of the artistic conception and layout structure of the small landscape. For example, Ma Yuan is called "Ma Jiao" and Xia Gui is called "Xia Banbian", which creates a new paradigm of landscape painting composition.

Ming dynasty:

China's landscape painting reached its peak in Ming Dynasty. There are many painting schools and countless painters, such as "Zhejiang School", "Wumen School" and "Hua Tingpai". Ming Hua Zhi contains more than 400 landscape painters. The representative painters of Zhejiang School are Dai Jin, Wei Wu, Zhang Lu, Wang Zhao, Zhu Bangfu, Lan Ying and others. They adopted Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, and most of them adopted Fang Bi, which is rough and fragile. Shen Zhou, Wen Zhiming, Tang Yin and Chou Ying are the representatives, starting from Dong Yuan and Fan Kuan, and Wang Meng and Zhenwu. Their pens are slender, elegant, vivid and bookish. Hua Tingpai, with Dong Qichang as the leader, is light in pen and ink, quaint and beautiful. Theoretically, Dong Qichang also made great achievements and put forward the theory of "Northern and Southern Song Dynasty".