Collection: Song Dynasty Painting

Song Dynasty Painting covers Chinese landscape, figure, and bird and flower painting produced under the Northern Song from 960 to 1127 and the Southern Song from 1127 to 1279. The period stands at the high point of classical Chinese painting, with the Hanlin Imperial Painting Academy, monastic studios, and the early literati amateurs all working at sustained levels of technical and intellectual ambition. Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126) was himself a major bird and flower painter and codified the academy's curriculum.

Northern Song monumental landscape, exemplified by Fan Kuan's Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (c. 1000), Li Cheng's A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks, and Guo Xi's Early Spring (1072), set the canonical idiom of the towering vertical composition rendered in modulated ink wash. The Southern Song court academy at Hangzhou developed the lyrical small format landscape of Ma Yuan (c. 1160–1225) and Xia Gui (c. 1180–1224), with their characteristic one-corner compositions on fan and album leaf. The Chan Buddhist painter monks Liang Kai and Muqi Fachang produced the period's most economical ink figures and animals, exporting to Japan a deep influence on later Zen painting. Mi Fu (1051–1107) and his son Mi Youren initiated the literati landscape that the Yuan masters would refine into the dominant post-Song idiom.