Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Qian Songyan was born in Yixing, Jiangsu province. He studied painting and calligraphy at a private school before attending a further education college. He subsequently taught at several schools, but spent most of his career at Wuxi College of Fine Arts in Jiangsu. Qian is known primarily as a traditionalist landscapist under the influence of the Ming and Qing literati painters. In 1960 he became one of the chief figures in the newly founded Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy. That Autumn, Qian spent three months travelling across six provinces to develop new ways of depicting landscape, together with Fu Baoshi, the head of the Academy, and other Academy artists including Ya Ming, Song Wenzhi and Wei Zixi. Later these artists are known as the ‘Jiangsu group’ for their extensive travels around the country and their subject of nationalistic celebration.

This painting shows the artist’s well-trained skills of traditional landscape painting. Unlike his other landscape paintings displayed in this exhibition or later reprinted in propaganda posters [see EA2006.21 featured in the partner exhibition Cultural Revolution: State Graphics in China in the 1960s and 1970s], this landscape features waterfalls, rocks, pines and a pavilion, the routine subjects in the tradition of depicting Mount Huang.