Fishing Villages by Riverbanks after Liu Songnian

For this compelling representation of idyllic rural life, painter Yuan Jiang was influenced by an artist who preceded him by six hundred years. Liu Songnian (active 1190–1224), a court painter, achieved fame for his Illustrations of Farming and Fishing, for which the emperor awarded him a gold belt. Liu’s work had a major impact on the agrarian subject matter that later court painters took on. This focus was both an extension of the idealism of Tao Yuanming’s The Peach Blossom Spring and a reflection of the importance of agriculture during the Southern Song dynasty, when the court fled to the south.

In Yuan’s painting, life in a fishing village unfolds as an episodic narrative. Individual scenes show various activities— reading by an open window by the river, resting on a low bed, flying a kite, bathing a buffalo, fishing on a boat, and preparing dried fish. Scenes like these appear in Tao Yuanming’s writing.