Landscape after Dong Yuan, Juran, Ma Yuan, and Xia Gui

Li Zai

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This landscape of swirling, fantastic mountains has puzzled scholars. The painting is signed “Li Zai of Putian,” a painter who lived during the fifteenth century, but its style clearly places it in the seventeenth century or later. Also, the artist’s inscription mentions the sixteenth-century collector Xiang Yuanbian, so it was obviously not intended to be a forgery of the fifteenth-century Li Zai, but the possibility of another painter by that name from the same hometown is unlikely. Whoever this Li Zai was, he was daring: as he states in the inscription, this painting is an attempt to combine the disparate styles of several old masters—Dong Yuan and Juran of the tenth century and Ma Yuan and Xia Gui of the thirteenth—and the results are fresh and unusual.

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