Ma Yuan

Ma Yuan (c. 1160-c. 1225), Chinese landscape painter of the Song dynasty, whose paintings, along with those of Xia Gui, represent the culmination of the Southern Song style; followers of the two artists were termed the Ma-Xia school. Born into a famous family of painters, Ma became a leader of the imperial painting academy at Hangzhou (Hangchow), receiving the highest honour given to a painter, the Golden Belt, and was apparently a favourite of the emperor Ningzong. His work represented a new style in painting—lyrical, evocative, restrained—in contrast to the more grandiose style of earlier centuries, and became the dominant model for later landscape art in the East Asian tradition.

Ma painted some figure and flower compositions, juxtaposing sprigs of blossom with empty backgrounds. However, his most celebrated mode was landscape. He painted large screens, hanging scrolls, hand scrolls, album leaves, and fan paintings. The most striking characteristic of Ma's monochrome ink paintings is their asymmetrical composition: the principal forms of the picture—trees, rocks, and human figures—are grouped in a lower corner, the famous “one-corner” technique. He achieved a balanced asymmetry, in which the blank areas of his paintings focus attention on the subject and at the same time suggest a limitless expanse of space. To link the two sections of the picture, he often used the device of a tree branch painted diagonally into or across the empty space.

Ma's ink technique in these works is faultless, equally distinguished for the evenness and control of the broad washes and the precision and clarity of the sharp “axe stroke” brushwork. He began with a fairly monumental style, but later favoured a more poetic approach, often composing night scenes. His highly popular works were often copied, even forged, which today makes positive authentication difficult; one painting widely accepted as his is Bare Willows and Distant Mountains (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Later painters of the Ming dynasty somewhat disdained Ma's professional fluency, but he was a dominant influence on painting in Korea and Japan.