| Fan Kuan | |
| Birth Date: | c. 960 |
| Birth Place: | Hua-yuan (Today: Yaozhou District), Shaanxi Province |
| Death Date: | c. 1030 |
| Nationality: | Chinese |
| Known For: | Landscapes |
| Movement: | Northern Landscape style |
Fan Zhongzheng (c. 960 – c. 1030), courtesy name Zhongli, better known by his pseudonym Fan Kuan, was a Chinese landscape painter of the Song dynasty. He was both a Daoist and a Neo-Confucianist.[1]
Travelers among Mountains and Streams, a large hanging scroll, is Fan Kuan's best known work, possibly his only surviving one, and a seminal painting of the Northern Song school. It establishes an ideal in monumental landscape painting to which later painters were to return time and again for inspiration.[2] The classic Chinese perspective of three planes is evident - near, middle (represented by water and mist), and far. Unlike earlier examples of Chinese landscape art, the grandeur of nature is the main theme, rather than merely providing a backdrop.[3] A packhorse train can barely be seen emerging from a wood at the base of a towering precipice. The painting's style encompasses archaic conventions dating back to the Tang dynasty.[4]
The historian Patricia Ebrey explains her view on the painting that the:
...foreground, presented at eye level, is executed in crisp, well-defined brush strokes. Jutting boulders, tough scrub trees, a mule train on the road, and a temple in the forest on the cliff are all vividly depicted. There is a suitable break between the foreground and the towering central peak behind, which is treated as if it were a backdrop, suspended and fitted into a slot behind the foreground. There are human figures in this scene, but it is easy to imagine them overpowered by the magnitude and mystery of their surroundings.[5]
Fan's masterpiece Travellers among Mountains and Streams bears a lost half-hidden signature rediscovered only in 1958.[4]