Early Spring

Guo Xi’s Early Spring, painted in 1072 during the Northern Song dynasty, is one of the greatest landscapes in the history of Chinese art. From a jumble of rocks and twisted pines at the base, the composition rises through mists to towering, half-seen peaks that dissolve into the blank silk of the sky. Guo Xi wrote that landscapes should create space for the traveler’s mind to wander; this work, with its blend of realism and transcendence, is the classic demonstration of that ideal.