2-735-470 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Moonlit Landscape, late 1500s. This unsigned and unsealed composition includes imagery from the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. Scanning the composition from right to left, four of the Eight Views subjects appear: sunset glow over a fishing village, returning sails off a distant shore, autumn moon over Lake Donting, and evening bell from a mist-shrouded temple. Not all the elements of the traditional Eight Views theme are here, but the artist suggests its literary presence by leading the viewer through a summer’s journey from one day to the next, aided, like the travelers in the landscape, by the light of the moon.