Fan Kuan

Fan Zhongzheng, courtesy name Zhongli, better known by his pseudonym Fan Kuan, was a Chinese landscape painter of the Song dynasty who lived circa 960 to circa 1030 and was both a Daoist and a Neo-Confucianist. His best known work, and possibly his only surviving one, is Travelers among Mountains and Streams, a large hanging scroll and a seminal painting of the Northern Song school that establishes an ideal in monumental landscape painting to which later painters returned time and again for inspiration. The painting shows the classic Chinese perspective of three planes, near, middle, represented by water and mist, and far, and unlike earlier Chinese landscape art, the grandeur of nature is the main theme rather than merely a backdrop; a packhorse train can barely be seen emerging from a wood at the base of a towering precipice, and the painting's style encompasses archaic conventions dating back to the Tang dynasty. Fan Kuan's masterpiece bears a lost, half hidden signature that was rediscovered only in 1958. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/