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

This article examines Rising Peaks and Piling Cliffs (1691), an important landscape painting by Fa Ruozhen (1613–1696), and argues that it commemorated the artist’s mother. Such a subject is highly unusual in landscape painting of the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911), when commemorative works more commonly memorialized the fallen Ming dynasty (1368–1644) 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. Additionally, in equally attending to Rising Peaks’s both formal and representational dimensions, it makes a case for renewed attention to the local and familial embeddedness of artistic production.