Landscape (after Huang Gongweng)

Although Lan Ying was a professional painter, he did not paint in the styles usually identified with those who sold their art for a living. Rather, his familiarity with the paintings of the great artists of the past led him to create works in the manner of earlier amateur-scholar (or literatus) painters—individuals who made paintings as a form of leisure and self-cultivation—most notably in the style of the Yuan dynasty master Huang Gongwang (1269–1354). In so doing, Lan Ying combined the technical competence of the professional painter with the artistic aspirations of the literatus practitioner.

This handscroll—self-consciously painted in the style of Huang Gongwang—is monumental in conception, both unusual in size and grandiose in the endlessly changes passages of rivers and mountains, vistas revealed as though in a real journey when the painting is unrolled (from right to left) section by section. Lan Ying is recorded to have traveled widely and observed the scenery of many regions of China, and although painted in the style of a past master, the handscroll achieves some of its impact from the attention given to the specifics of each imaginary site.

Thirteen inscriptions, some on the painting itself and others appended at the end of the scroll, compose a roster of notable scholars, collectors, and calligraphers in the late Ming to early Qing dynasty art world of mid-17th-century China. One says that viewing the painting gave him the strange feeling that Huang Gongwang had reappeared. Another confesses that when the artist first showed him the scroll, he thought that he was looking at an authentic Huang Gongwang. In his own inscription at the end of the painting, Lan Ying considered this work one his finest.