Fan Zhongzheng

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Biography:

Fan Kuan, also known as Fan Zhongzheng, was a Chinese landscape painter of the Song dynasty. He was both a Daoist and a Neo-Confucianist. His best known work is 'Travelers among Mountains and Streams', a large hanging scroll, which is possibly his only surviving one. This seminal painting of the Northern Song school established an ideal in monumental landscape painting to which later painters were to return time and again for inspiration. Fan Kuan's style encompasses archaic conventions dating back to the Tang dynasty. He was a scholar-official and a gentlemanly painter, ideally illustrating his own poetry and producing the paintings as gifts for friends or patrons, rather than painting for payment. Fan Kuan's masterpiece 'Travelers among Mountains and Streams' bears a lost half-hidden signature rediscovered only in 1958.