Wang Hui: Peach Blossom, Fishing Boat

Description

This work illustrates the lines from Tao Yuanming’s prose poem “The Peach Blossom Spring,” which relates how the fisherman stumbled upon the Spring: “Once he was going up a 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 (緣溪行，忘路之遠近，忽逢桃花林，夾岸數百步).” 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 Yuan artist Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322). Zhao was one of the first to create paintings combining the themes of flowering streams and hermit fishermen. This leaf is from “Collaborative Album of Flowers and Landscapes” with flowers by Yun Shouping and landscapes by Wang Hui.