The evolution of painting style is a fascinating subject that intrigues both scholars and art lovers in general. Contrary to popular opinion, the forces that shape art is not always dictated by the leisure class who has money and time for art, nor by artists themselves trying to innovate.

‘Scholar by a waterfall’ by Ma Yuan (1190=1125) is a case in point. Painted more than a thousand years ago during China’s Southern Song Dynasty, it depicts a scholar dressed in a flowing white robe seated by a waterfall. Ma Yuan utilizes the dark silhouette of a boulder as a striking counterfoil to the man, and painted both man and waterfall in angular profiles and sharp contour strokes that suggest mass and volume. Despite the grandeur of the scene, the painting is actually quite small, measuring just 25 by 26 cm. This small format and painting’s style belies the tumultuous social history of the time the work was executed. Here’s the background.

In 1127, the Song Dynasty court was forced by invading Jurchen tribesmen to relocate to the south, thus commencing the reign of the Southern Song Dynasty which lasted until 1279. Prior to this event, most landscape paintings in China were of monumental proportions, as if a reflection of the optimism of the times. After the turmoil of 1127, a new capital was established in Hangzhou in 1138. It was then that artists began to work in smaller formats, such as this one, focusing intensively on intimate corners of nature to create scenes of quiet contemplation as if as antidotes to the uncertainty of the times. Ma Yuan was a leading artist at the Southern Song Painting Academy in Hangzhou, a city of unsurpassed beauty graced with pavilions, gardens, and scenic vistas. And this natural beauty was exactly what Ma needed to portray scenes of quiet contemplation.

In the painting, Ma depicts a gentlemen in a gardenlike setting, gazing pensively into the burbling rapids of a cascade. The jagged rhythms of the pine tree and rock contrast with the quiet mood of the scholar. Using these elements, Ma Yuan reduces nature to a poetic geometry of angular forms and emptiness. The diagonally divided “one-corner” composition leads from chiseled foreground forms to a mist-filled distance, guiding the viewer’s eyes from rocks and trees to the sound of rushing water, and from the sensory world to an awareness of the infinite. Scholar by a Waterfall is thus more than a pretty picture. It is a reminder of man’s smallness in the metaphysical landscape of this world and beyond.  

“There are times in life when nothing happens
but in quietness the soul expands.“

~ Rockwell Kent, artist