Pulling Oars under Clearing Autumn Skies 晴秋涉櫂圖

Landscape painting offered artists the opportunity to create visual poems about the beauty and continuity of nature and man's place in it. Lu Zhi, a 16th-century artist, belonged to a class of highly educated men who painted for their own pleasure. In Distant Mountains, he used multiple ground planes and suggestive voids to create a majestic vista of jagged peaks and a meandering, wide river. Through the crystalline precision of his brush strokes, the artist achieved an image of great clarity and refinement.