Details
LU GUANG (14TH CENTURY)

WATER VILLAGE

Handscroll, ink and light color on linen paper
19.5 x 115 cm. (7 3/4 x 45 1/4 in.)
Signed: painted by Tianyou Sheng
Dated the second month of jiachen year of the Zhizheng era (1364)
One seal of the artist: Tian You
Five colophons, including one each by Xu Zhenqing (1479-1511), Mo Shilong (?-1587) and Sun Chengze (1592-1676)
Nine collectors' seals, including one of Liang Qingbiao (1620-1691)

Lot Essay

(US$230,800-256,400)

Lu Guang (14th century), zi Jihong, hao Tianyou sheng, was a native of Suzhou, Jiangsu province. Although other art history books recorded that Lu Guang studied landscapes and brushworks of Wang Meng (1308-1385), his style was as a matter of fact in between Huang Gongwang (1269-1354), Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) and Cao Zhibai (1272-1355). Only a few existing pieces of his work in both private and public collection: small scrolls of Spring Morning at a Cinnabar Terrace, Spring View of a Cinnabar Terrace, Mountain Cottage in a Clear Autumn Day, and a large hanging scroll Tower in an Immortal Mountain, now in the collection of the Palace Museum, Taipei. Some of the landscape elements underlying a parallel development with genre such as the misty landscape of the Song period, and the low round-topped hills resembling to Dong Yuan (923-976) in a "level distance" landscape. Bamboo near the river banks were particularly Cao Zhibai, and tree branches archaic and other-worldly. This painting is a masterpiece of Lu Guang's late work.
His use of spacing, recession, and the bonds of visual coherency retain a clear-cut coordination, albeit one tinged with overtones of a decorative urge towards expressively calculated pattern and self-conscious rhythmic intervals. Lu Guang's painting, a continuance of an unbroken tradition of Jiangnan school which had survived as an undercurrent during the ascendancy of Southern Song academic styles.

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