After Huang Jucai’s Autumn Mountains

Ding Yunpeng is best known as a painter of religious figures and blue-and-green landscapes. He spent much of his career in the Jiang and Zhe regions where he practiced Chan Buddhism at a local monastery and made the acquaintance of local scholars. This elaborate landscape belongs to an early stage of his career and shows strong influences from the past and a revival of the classical blue-and-green landscape style. By imitating the celebrated style of Huang Jucai (approx. 933–993), Ding references several earlier traditions with his archaistic recreation of scalloped clouds, folding rock forms, and the palette of blue and green, illustrating colorful autumn mountains inhabited by Daoist immortals.