Winter landscape

Jiang Song

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Little is known about the Nanjing artist Jiang Song except that he descended from a family of imperial physicians and officials but chose to support himself as a professional painter. Concentrating on a limited repertoire of images—lone fishermen, scholars living in reclusion, and mountain travelers—all of which appear in this work, Jiang's paintings are noteworthy for their dramatically abstracted landscape forms, dashing brushwork, subtly graded washes, and bold contrasts in ink tone in the manner of Shi Zhong (1438–ca. 1517), another Nanjing painter known for his bravura snowscapes. This unsigned painting is attributed to Jiang Song on the basis of its similarity to a set of four short paintings now in the East Asian Art Museum, Berlin.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art