Summer Mountains after Rain

Painted in ink on silk, this long, rectangular wall scroll depicts a summer landscape after rain. The painting, which occupies roughly four-fifths of the silk ground, is followed by the artist’s long inscription in standard-script characters (kaishu), which occupies the remaining one fifth of the silk ground. Clinging closely to the picture plane, the landscape, which reads from right to left, in traditional Chinese fashion, includes foreground hillocks and a wall of background mountains, the two separated by a mist-enshrouded valley. The scene opens with a tree-covered hillock; a path, or small bridge, is visible in the cleft that divides the hillock into two; a small waterfall tumbles down the face of the hillock’s larger segment. Distance and obscuring mists reduce the distant mountains to sheer cliffs and overlapping planes that recall those of the monumental mountain in the quintessential Northern Song (960–1279) landscape painting Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan (fl. 990–1020), now in the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Towering pines grow in the space between the first hillock and the long second one; that space also affords a view of the base of the distant mountains and also of the stream that flows through the valley that separates foreground and background elements. Set on a distant hill at the base of the tall, background mountains, a cluster of buildings—perhaps a temple, an estate, or even a village—is faintly visible through the mists and above those pines that rise near the right end of the second foreground hillock. Farther to the left, a mountain rises from the center of the second hillock, its form and “moss dots” echoing those of the distant mountains, thus linking foreground and background and unifying the composition. A gap between the left edge of the second hillock and the foreground mountain at the composition’s left edge permits a view of the waterfall that tumbles down the side of a distant mountain and that is perhaps the source of the river that flows through the valley. Just as the path, or small bridge, at the beginning of the painting invites the viewer to enter the composition, the tall mountains at the end, which recede from foreground to background, bring the composition to a close. The artist’s long inscription follows the painting and is written on the same stretch of silk as the painting itself. Comprising 1072 characters written in standard script (kaishu), the inscription is arranged in thirty seven columns of twenty nine characters each (except for the last column—i.e., the column at the far left—which includes just twenty eight characters, the twenty ninth space being left for the artist’s seal). The artist’s dated signature comprises the last five characters of the inscription and reads "xinmao Xiangzhou zhi", which can be translated as “…done [by] Xiangzhou [in the] xinmao [year].” Note that the xingmao year corresponds to 2011 in the Gregorian calendar. The artist’s square, red, intaglio seal impression reading "Xiang Zhou" appears in the lower left corner of the work, immediately following the artist’s signature. The painting was silk-matted in Beijing; it was framed in New York, following the frame style that The Chinese Porcelain Company uses for Tai Xiangzhou’s works, The Chinese Porcelain Company being the New York gallery that represents Tai Xiangzhou in the U.S.