Landscape with Poems

This long handscroll comprises a four-character frontispiece, a landscape painted in ink and color on silk, and a poem written in ink on paper in running script ("xingshu"). Both the painting and poem are signed "Zhengming", indicating that both works were created by the celebrated Ming-dynasty literati painter Wen Zhengming (1470-1559). Executed in the so-called "blue-green" manner (an archaistic mode of painting that evokes the vibrant malachite-blue and azurite-green mineral pigments used by early Chinese painters to color natural scenery), the painting depicts several figures--probably scholars and servants, based on the dress and accoutrements carried--positioned alone or in pairs at various points in the landscape. Figures are shown meandering along mountain a paths, gazing at a waterfall or across calm waters, or quietly meditating while floating on a skiff. The poem that follows the painting was written a year later than the painting, but it makes elegant reference to the landscape imagery that precedes it.