Artwork Page for Xintang (Immortal's Peak)

Details / Information for Xintang (Immortal's Peak)

Series Title: Eighteen Views of Huzhou, 湖州十八景圖

Xintang (Immortal's Peak)

新塘

c. 1588

Song Xu 宋旭

(Chinese, 1525-c. 1606)
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Culture
China, Jiaxing, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
Medium
Album leaf; ink and color on silk
Measurements
Sheet: 26.4 x 28.4 cm (10 3/8 x 11 3/16 in.)
Credit Line
The Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund 1998.78.1
Public Domain
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Location
Not on view
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Description

By the 1500s, visits to historic and scenic sites in the lower Yangzi delta stimulated an increase of printed illustrated travel books. Topographical depictions of local scenery flourished.

Leaves from this album illustrates sites around Lake Tai of the two adjacent counties Changxing and Wuxing (modern Huzhou). Song Xu, who lived intermittently in Jiaxing and Songjiang, must have passed through Wuxing by boat and thus knew the region.

The paintings are inscribed with gazetteerlike notations, suggesting that the album was produced for clients as commemorative works, a travel guide, or for “armchair travel” (woyou) in one’s mind.
A landscape painting on silk features a craggy cliff on our left, sprinkled with pine trees and a small house with orange walls. Below, a winding shoreline path leads two figures, portrayed through brief brushstrokes, past tufts of grass. To our right, small sailboats dot a vast body of water near a distant village. Chinese calligraphy and a red seal mark the upper right corner of the mottled tan background.

Xintang (Immortal's Peak)

c. 1588

Song Xu

(Chinese, 1525-c. 1606)
China, Jiaxing, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)

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