Books devoted to landscape painting in China seem to come along only every few decades. This is the first book-length study to appear in English since Michael Sullivan's Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1979), which in turn followed Sherman Lee's Chinese Landscape Painting (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, [1954] 1962). Completed in the 1990s and revised before Harrie Vanderstappen's death in 2007, The Landscape Painting of China: Musings of a Journeyman brings together a lifetime of thinking, studying, and teaching about the art of landscape painting in China.
In his introduction, Vanderstappen sets out his basic assumptions about Chinese landscape painting based in part on early texts. Nature is both tiandi and ziran; it is the painter's task to absorb the outward appearance (tiandi) and then proceed to reach its source, its inner reality (ziran)....
