Landscape with Buildings

This anonymous work arises from the Southern School, or literati tradition, the style that dominated landscape painting among the scholarly elite in China from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Its vocabulary of mountains, rocks, water, trees, and buildings seems dashed off in a cursory manner, the mountains given texture with quivering lines, the trees and buildings rendered with a childlike simplicity. However, each brushstroke has both “ancestry and a lord,” a pedigree of stylistic and historic associations for each stroke and dot that an educated viewer could decode immediately.

The many red collectors’ seals attest to the painting’s history; its final owner was the most important early patron of the AMAM, Elizabeth Severance Allen Prentiss. The few works of Asian art she donated to the museum were, like this one, out of the mainstream for most American collectors of her era. Wide appreciation for literati painting was not to come until decades later.