Landscape and Poem: "Mooring at Twilight in Yuyi District" by Wei Yingwu (737–792)

The military official An Jae-geon brushed this album leaf in ink and light color. Various motifs of the landscape—a full moon, a band of descending geese, two scholars meeting at a bridge, the dark contour of a cliff with a path souring above a bay—all respond to the narrative and setting of the evocative poem by the eighth-century Chinese poet Wei Yingwu that An Jae-geon inscribed at the upper right. This inscription is excerpted from a compilation of early Chinese poetry called 300 Tang Poems and reads: People are coming home / The outline of the mountain peak darkens / Wild geese fly down to a field of weeds under the moonlight. / Painted with a free brush by Su Gon [a studio name]. There are two other leaves from the same album also painted and inscribed by An Jae-geon in the Smart Museum collection (see Smart Museum object numbers 1995.81 and 1995.82).