Dong Yuan
Dong Yuan was a Chinese artist from Zhongling in the Southern Tang Kingdom in southeastern China. He lived from circa 932 to circa 962. Yuan was an administrative official while also an artist, serving as the deputy envoy of Beiyuan in the Southern Tang Dynasty. He is remembered for founding the Southern School of landscape painting. Yuan set the standard for Chinese brush painting for the next 900 years during the ‘Great Age of Chinese Landscape’.
In 907, the Tang Dynasty toppled, shattering the country with the decentralization of power. Yuan lived within the Southern Tang Dynasty near the lower Yangtze River, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. During this time, political upheavals, short lived kingdoms, and rapid dynasty successions created more fragmented political boundaries. Yuan, along with his pupil Juran, founded the Jiangnan Landscape style, known as the Southern school of landscape painting. The Northern school was being led by contemporary artists, Jing Hao, and his pupil, Guan Tong. Though they were all important, Yuan is often credited as being the most influential.
Yuan was a master at landscape composition, and included lots of space in his pieces, which have a flow and movement of their own. He typically depicted soft and lush hills with a waterway running through. Instead of strong contour lines, he used soft brushwork, gentle washes, and a more sophisticated perspective. His lines were soft, built up with gentle ink washes or rubbed to smudge the stronger lines. Using a hemp-fiber brush, he used his paint strokes to give texture and detail to vegetation and the mountain landscapes.
Many of his techniques are basic drafting techniques that are now used all the time, including cross hatching and pointillism. Yuan set the standard for Chinese brush painting and remained highly influential for the next 900 years during the ‘Great Age of Chinese Landscape’. Dong Yuan died circa 962, at approximately 30 years old.
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