Song Wenzhi was born in Taicang, Jiangsu province. Originally an art teacher, he joined the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy in 1957. He toured the country with Fu Baoshi, Qian Songyan and other artists in 1960. He was later deputy head of the Nanjing Art Academy. Song is well known as a landscapist of the Jiangnan region and for his work from the late 1950s to 1970s in which contemporary political trends are reflected in traditional style landscapes.
This painting depicts Mount Hua in a traditional style, yet the seal of the artist indicates the painting’s patriotic function as ‘praising the grand landscape of motherland’, which was considered a key function of the revival of Chinese landscape painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Vainker, Shelagh, Chinese Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2000), no. 121 on p. 140, illus. p. 140 fig. 121
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