Huang Gongwang
The eldest of the Four Masters of the Yuan.
Huang Gongwang painted Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains over several years in his old age. The scroll was damaged in a fire and now exists in two parts.
Huang Gongwang was born in 1269 in Changshu in present-day Jiangsu province. He was born Lu Jian but was adopted as a child by an elderly man of the Huang family. He worked as a minor official but was imprisoned for a time in connection with a corruption scandal involving his superior. After that he left official service, joined a Daoist movement and supported himself, among other things, as a fortune-teller.
He began painting seriously late in life, inspired by older masters such as Dong Yuan and Juran. He wrote a short text on landscape painting in which he advises the painter always to carry a brush and sketch what he sees. He is regarded as the eldest of the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty, together with Wu Zhen, Ni Zan and Wang Meng.
He painted his masterpiece, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, between about 1347 and 1350 for a Daoist friend. It is a long handscroll in ink on paper, in which soft, rounded mountains, trees and water follow one another in a calm rhythm. The brushstrokes are dry and light and build up the landscape layer by layer.
The scroll's history is dramatic. In the 17th century a collector wanted it burned with him when he died. It was thrown on the fire but rescued by a relative, split into two parts. The shorter part is in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, the longer in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. In 2011 the two parts were shown together in Taipei for the first time in over 300 years. In the 18th century the Qianlong Emperor believed a copy to be genuine and inscribed it profusely.
Huang Gongwang became one of the great models for the scholar painters of the Ming and Qing, and Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is regarded as one of China's very finest landscape paintings.