Ma Yuan
Master of the single corner.
Ma Yuan was a court painter in the Southern Song who often let the subject occupy only one corner of the picture, while the rest was filled with mist and empty space.
Ma Yuan was born around 1160 and died around 1225. He came from a family that had produced court painters for several generations, and his son Ma Lin continued the tradition. He worked at the imperial painting academy in Hangzhou, capital of the Southern Song dynasty, under the emperors Guangzong and Ningzong.
Ma Yuan is known for a new type of composition. Instead of filling the picture with a huge mountain, as the Northern Song painters had done, he placed the subject in a corner. A cliff, a crooked pine or a scholar gazing out over water takes up one corner, while the rest of the picture is filled with mist, water or emptiness. This earned him the nickname “One-Corner Ma”. Together with Xia Gui he founded what is known as the Ma–Xia school.
His works include Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, in which a scholar walks beneath willows as a bird flies off. An album of twelve pictures of water in different forms, from calm ripples to stormy seas, is in the Palace Museum in Beijing. He often painted in small formats, such as fans and album leaves, with strong, angular brushstrokes for rocks.
Later Chinese critics, especially in the Ming period, looked down on court painters such as Ma Yuan and preferred the scholar-amateurs. In Japan, by contrast, the Ma–Xia style was greatly admired and became highly important for ink painting in the Muromachi period. His poetic use of empty space is now regarded as one of the greatest achievements of Song painting.