Visiting an Old Friend in the Spring Mountains

Sheng Mou (active c. 1310-1340) was a Chinese painter of the Yuan dynasty known for his landscape paintings in the ink manner of the literati tradition. Visiting an Old Friend in the Spring Mountains from the 1300s depicts a scholar visiting a friend in the mountains in the ink landscape manner that distinguishes the best Yuan dynasty literati painting. The painting is a classic subject in Chinese landscape painting—the scholar visiting a friend in the mountains—which expresses the literati ideal of retirement from official life into the natural world of mountains and streams.

Visiting an Old Friend in the Spring Mountains is important in the history of Chinese painting because it demonstrates the literati landscape tradition of the Yuan dynasty, when Chinese scholars were living under Mongol rule and expressed their retirement from official life through the ink landscape painting of mountains and streams. The subject of the scholar visiting a friend in the mountains is one of the most traditional in Chinese landscape painting, and Sheng Mou's treatment shows the Yuan dynasty literati tradition at its most accomplished.

Visiting an Old Friend in the Spring Mountains is Sheng Mou's Yuan dynasty literati landscape: a scholar visiting a friend in the mountains, the classic subject that expresses the literati ideal of retirement from official life into the natural world. The 1300s painting shows the Yuan dynasty ink landscape tradition at its most accomplished, when Chinese scholars under Mongol rule expressed their ideals through landscape painting.