The earliest landscape painting was "Background Landscape" by Gu Kaizhi, a famous painter in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. Gu Kaizhi's two paintings mainly focus on characters, and the scenery is only the background of the characters. Although this kind of performance is still in its infancy, it has laid a solid foundation for the future development of China's landscape painting.
During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, Zhan Ziqian's only work, "You Chuntu", is a green landscape painting depicting natural scenery and showing people's spring outing. Through vivid description of various natural scenery and people's activities, the painter successfully embodied the theme of spring outing, which opened the way for the formation of green landscape painting school in Tang Dynasty.
Father and son in Tang Dynasty directly inherited Zhan's landscape painting style. Li Sixun inherited and developed Zhan Ziqian's painting method. His brushwork is neat, and his pictures are magnificent, magnificent and decorative. His son Li Zhaodao inherited his painting style and created seascapes and landscapes.
In this way, the distinctive green landscape painting school in China landscape painting was formed. In the Tang dynasty, another source of landscape painting school was formed, that is, ink landscape painting. Wang Wei is the founder of ink and wash landscape painting. Wang Weiqi's paintings are "heavy" and "profound". Another important feature is the organic combination of poetry and painting. In the middle and late Tang Dynasty after Wang Wei, there was an "ink painting movement" in the development of landscape painting, which developed into a free new world in the Tang Dynasty.
In the Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty, painters inherited and developed the excellent traditions of landscape painters in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties, and pushed China's landscape painting to an unprecedented peak, forming the northern and southern landscape paintings in the Five Dynasties. During the Five Dynasties, Hao Jing and his student Guan Tong were representatives of northern landscape painting. His masterpiece "Travel Map of Guanshan" has been handed down from generation to generation.
In the south, Dong Yuan and his disciple Ju Ran represented the Jiangnan School of Painting, also known as the "Southern School of Landscape Painting". Dong Yuan's representative works include Xiaoxiang Map, which depicts the scenery of Xiaoxiang area, and Summer Mountain Map, which depicts the scenery of Jiangnan in summer. Ju Ran, a disciple of Dong Yuan, became the best successor of his painting style, and his masterpiece is Tween in Autumn Mountain.
During the Northern Song Dynasty, the Central Plains Painting School and Academy Landscape Painting appeared. The Central Plains Painting School is represented by Li Cheng and Fan Kuan. Li Chuangshi lives in Yingqiu County, Shandong Province, so he often describes the natural environment of Qilu and Yuan Ye. Fan Kuan has lived in Zhong Nanshan and Dahuashan for a long time. His paintings are rich in mountains, abrupt in stones and lush in trees.
After the unification of the Northern Song Dynasty, painters from the south of the Yangtze River went north one after another and were treated by the Northern Song Dynasty Painting Academy, which impacted the Northern Song Dynasty landscape painting with the Central Plains painting school as the mainstream, and the northern and southern painting schools began to merge, forming a courtyard landscape painting represented by Guo.
The founder of Midian Landscape is Mifei. In landscape painting techniques, influenced by the misty and rainy scenery of Yunshan and the smoke trees, the landscape is painted with ink and wash, giving full play to the integration of ink and wash. Then there are green mountains and green waters. This school of painting was formed from Zhan Ziqian in Sui Dynasty to Li Sixun and his son in Tang Dynasty. However, in the Five Dynasties and the early Song Dynasty, this form was not popular among literati and painters, and was regarded as the work of professional painters, which was once suppressed in the Northern Song Dynasty. In the mid-Northern Song Dynasty, some painters pushed their way through the crowd and plunged into the green landscape again, creating exquisite green landscape paintings suitable for the court to enjoy. Turquoise landscape painting has entered a mature stage, and famous representative painters include Wang Ximeng and Zhao Boju.
In the Southern Song Dynasty, due to the change of political situation and the movement of the painter's living area from north to south, the courtyard landscape painting of the Southern Song Dynasty, represented by the "four masters of the Southern Song Dynasty", appeared. The courtyard landscape painting in the Southern Song Dynasty abandoned the alpine torrent composition and fine and complicated brushwork centered on the main peak since the Northern Song Dynasty, and innovated into a simple and simple form. Diagonal composition is often made by comparing the distance between two diagonals, so that the center of gravity of the picture deviates from the center and is located in half the corner. Known as the "corner and a half" artistic realm.
During the Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty, literati painting in the field of landscape painting, after the artistic pursuit and practice of "Yuan Sijia" after the Song Dynasty, became the dominant painting circle.
Except for a few painters, most landscape paintings in Ming and Qing dynasties mainly imitate ancient times, highlighting the interest of pen and ink. For example, in the early Ming dynasty, the painting circles mainly advocated the style of the Southern Song Dynasty Painting Academy and the Zhejiang School. But after that, I made a breakthrough in painting. They emphasize subjective beauty.
Shen Zhou, Wen Zhiming, Tang Yin and Chou Ying in the middle of Ming Dynasty made great achievements in landscape painting.
Shen Zhou combined the strengths of Dong Yuan, Ju Ran, Mi Fei, Zhenwu and Wang Meng. And created various styles of landscape paintings. His landscape paintings have been handed down from generation to generation, such as "Lushan Mountain High Map" and "Cangzhou Interesting Map Volume". Wen Zhiming's landscape painting has two specifications: meticulous painting and freehand brushwork, and there are freehand brushwork, freehand brushwork and splash ink. Tang Yin's paintings are self-contained, adopting the methods of Li Cheng, Fan Kuan and the Southern Song Dynasty, as well as those of Yuan people.
After the four schools of Wumen, there were many schools of landscape painting in Ming Dynasty, among which Hua Tingpai, Susong and Yun Jian were the larger schools, among which Hua Tingpai had the greatest influence. Because these three schools belong to the same area (Songjiang), their aesthetic concepts and painting styles are basically the same, so people collectively call them "Songjiang School".
The landscape painting altar with numerous factions in the late Ming Dynasty is also very distinctive in the Qing Dynasty. The so-called "orthodox school" and "innovative school" appeared, which have always influenced the atmosphere of the whole painting circle in Qing Dynasty. Due to the closed-door policy and cultural autocracy of the Qing rulers, they tried their best to consolidate the small-scale peasant economy and suppress commodity production. In this context, the field of painting began to regress and mutate. This is represented by the "six masters in the early Qing Dynasty", who are divorced from reality in art and cling to the line of pen and ink skills of their predecessors. Learning from the ancients has become a major tendency of their landscape painting creation. This kind of artistic opinion and style can cater to the ideological restraint policy of the Qing Dynasty and the aesthetic taste of the literati at that time, which is very supported and appreciated by the government and is regarded as the so-called "orthodoxy".
In the early Qing Dynasty, Wang Shimin was the leader, and the rest were Wang Jian, Wang Yi, Wang, Yun and so on. They all advocate copying ancient times, and their works are mostly copied, which makes landscape painting a big step forward in technique.
When the "orthodoxy" represented by the Sixth National Congress embarked on the road of retro-ism, a group of Han intellectual painters with strong national consciousness and creative spirit began to inherit the trend of liberation that broke through the tradition after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, dared to break through and come forward in art, emphasized the liberation of individuality, advocated "borrowing the past to create the present", and expressed their real life feelings through the application and transformation of traditional painting forms. In the history of painting, these people are generally called "reformists", and the representatives of this school are the famous "four famous monks" and "Jinling Eight Schools" in the early Qing Dynasty. The painting styles of "Four Great Monks" and "Eight Sons of Jinling" had a far-reaching influence on the later development of China landscape painting.