The Peach Blossom Fishing Boat |
Wang Hui (1632-1717), Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911) This work illustrates the lines from T'ao Yüan-ming's prose poem "The Peach Blossom Spring," which relates how the fisherman stumbled upon the Spring: "Once he was going up a certain stream. Oblivious to the distance he had traveled, he suddenly found himself in a forest of blossoming peach trees that lined the banks for several hundred paces." Here, we see the blossoming peach trees and the solitary fisherman's skiff. The verdant landscape is laced with white clouds for an almost mystical effect. The artist's inscription states that this scroll is a copy of another painting of the same title by the Yüan artist Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322). Chao was one of the first to create paintings combining the themes of flowering streams and hermit fishermen. He himself was from the region of Wu-hsing, Chekiang, home to the Cha River, which boasted peach forests at its uppermost reaches. He likened the place to the Peach Blossom Spring and once thought of retiring there to live as a recluse. This leaf is from an album of landscape and flower paintings by Wang Hui and Yün Shou-p'ing.
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