Clouds at Huangshan: Maternal Commemoration and the Gendered Dimension of an Early Qing Landscape Painting

Abstract

This article examines Rising Peaks and Piling Cliffs (1691), a major landscape painting by Fa Ruozhen (1613–1696), and argues that it commemorated the artist’s mother. Such a subject is highly unusual in early Qing landscape painting, where commemorative works more commonly memorialized the fallen Ming dynasty or male friends and patrons. By foregrounding maternal remembrance, the article introduces a distinctly gendered perspective into the study of seventeenth-century Chinese landscape painting. By attending to the local, this article calls for renewed attention to detail and to the social and familial embeddedness of artistic production.