I. fig. 3 shows a fragment). With the
T'ang age landscape matured, and two schools arose, one headed by Wang
Wei, the other by Li Ssue-hsuen. The style of Wang Wei, who was equally
famous as a poet, had a romantic idealist character--disdainful of mere
fact--which in later developments created the "literary man's picture"
of the Southern school, as opposed to the vigorous naturalism of the
North.

Five dynasties (A.D. 907-960).

Next come five brief dynasties, memorable less for any corporate style
or tradition, than for some fine painters like Hsue Hsi, famous for his
flowers, and Huang Ch'uan, a great master in a delicate style. Two
pictures by him, fowls and peonies, of extraordinary beauty, are in the
British Museum.

Sung dynasty (A.D. 960-1280).

The empire, which had been broken up, was reunited, though shorn of its
outer dependencies, under the house of Sung. This was an age of culture
in which the freedom of the individual was proclaimed anew; glorious in
art as in poetry and philosophy; the period which for Asia stands in
history as the Periclean age for Europe.

The religious paintings of Li Lung-mien, the grandest of Sung masters,
if less forcible than those of T'ang, were unsurpassed in harmonious
rhythm of design and colour. But the most characteristic painting of
this period is in landscape and nature-subjects. With a passion
unmatched in Europe till Wordsworth's day, the Sung artists portrayed
their delight in mountains, mists, plunging torrents, the flight of
the wild geese from the reed-beds, the moonlit reveries of sages in
forest solitudes, the fisherman in his boat on lake or stream. To them
also, steeped in the Zen philosophy of contemplation, a flowering
branch was no mere subject for a decorative study, but a symbol of the
infinite life of nature. A mere hint to the spectator's imagination is
often all that they rely on; proof of the singular fulness and reality
of the culture of the time. The art of suggestion has never been
carried farther. Such traditional subjects as "Curfew from a Distant
Temple" and "The Moon over Raging Waves" indicate the poetic
atmosphere of this art. Ma Yuan, Hsia Kuei and the emperor Hwei-tsung
are among the greatest landscape artists of this period. They belong
to the South Sung school, which loved to paint the gorges and towering
rock-pinnacles of the Yangtsze. The sterner, less romantic scenery of
the Hwang-Ho in