Landscape (in the manner of Dong Qichang)

Although very little is known about the artist of this hanging scroll, the inscription tells us that he was a close friend of Herrlee Creel, founder of East Asian studies at the University of Chicago. Creel left China in 1932 after three years of intensive study in Beijing; the painting was most likely a parting gift from the artist.

The style of the painting itself is an intentional quotation, or fang in Chinese, of the famed 17th century painter and art theorist, Gond Qichang. Dong, like many literati artists throughout history, championed the contemplative spontaneity of the amateur over the more studied representations by so-called professional painters. The artist of this hanging scroll captures Dong’s later style, in which bands of light grey and black ink were used to create richly textured landscapes. While the painting exudes a kind of flatness associated with Dong, it lacks many of the spatial ambiguities typical of his landscapes. Instead, Juan’s composition exhibits a rather ordered spatial recession that may have been inspired by western notions of linear perspective.