Huáng Gōngwàng (1269–1354) was a painter born during the late Song Dynasty

Song Dynasty

The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...

 in Changshu, Jiangsu. He is the oldest of the "four great masters of the Yuan

Yuan Dynasty

The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was a ruling dynasty founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, who ruled most of present-day China, all of modern Mongolia and its surrounding areas, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. It is considered both as a division of the Mongol Empire and as an...

." After serving as an official he acted as a Taoist priest. He spent his last years in the Fu-ch'un mountains near Hangzhou

Hangzhou

Hangzhou , formerly transliterated as Hangchow, is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China. Governed as a sub-provincial city, and as of 2010, its entire administrative division or prefecture had a registered population of 8.7 million people...

 devoting himself to Taoism. It was here that in ca. 1350 he completed his most famous, and arguably greatest, work, "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is the magnum opus and one of the few surviving works by the painter Huang Gongwang . Painted between 1348 and 1350, the Chinese landscape painting was burnt into two pieces in 1650. Today, one piece is kept in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, while the...

".

In art he rejected the landscape conventions of his era's Academy, but is regarded as one of the great literati painters. He had two styles. One was dependent on the use of purple and the other preferred black ink. Like all other Chinese scholar-officials of his era he was also a poet. Lastly he had some talent for music.

He wrote a treatise on landscape painting, Secrets of Landscape Painting (寫山水訣).

External links

• Huang Gongwang and his Painting Gallery at China Online Museum