he three centuries of history during which Chinese
landscape painting reached its culminating point.

Tung Yuean and Chue Jan are considered by the critics as having founded a
special school in the great tradition of Wang Wei. Their paintings were
quiet in coloring and were executed with broad strokes in an impressionist
style. These works must be viewed from a distance to see their apparent
violence merge into extreme elegance. They furnish a complete
demonstration of the laws of atmospheric perspective, with its feeling of
distance and infinite space, in which forms are immersed. Here we find
evidence that these painters were the first to attempt the arrangement of
lines according to rule, which led ultimately to calligraphic painting.

Among the heads of schools cited in the Chinese writings Ma Yuean and Hsia
Kuei of the Sung dynasty must be placed in a class by themselves. Both of
these masters lived at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the
thirteenth centuries. Their style can be described with accuracy since
original examples are extant--both by themselves and by their
disciples--in which their characteristics are fully revealed.

Ma Yuean is classed with the Southern School by reason of his restraint in
the use of color, his greatness of conception and his technical treatment
of forms. But he brings to his work a virility in which the influence of
the Northern School is plainly discerned. He has a broad stroke and a
masterful manner which place his works in the front rank of all Chinese
painting. His mountainous backgrounds rear themselves with fierce energy.
His old pines, with branches wreathed in vines, would suffice alone to
define his style, so freely do they express the force of plant life and
the proud defiance of the aged tree. He loved the mountain solitudes to
which he gave a new imagery, so authoritative and so perfect that it
served to create a school.

The influence of Ma Yuean was felt by his brother and by his son, Ma Lin.
Although the death of the latter occurred under the Mongolian dynasty, he
was an exponent of Sung art. The fierce energy of the old master gives way
to a somewhat more melancholy and gentle quality in his son. There is the
same restraint in the handling of the brush, the same reserve in the use
of color, but the landscape stretches out into deep and dreamy vistas that
are indescribably poetic. The melancholy of autumn, the sadness of flights
of birds that circle in th