Early Spring

At the base of Guo Xi's Early Spring, at the foot of a huge breathing mountain, a man on a donkey and two attendants are crossing a rickety wooden bridge. They are on their way up to the temple halfway up the peak. They are almost invisible. Look again and you find the rest of them: two fishermen at the bottom right, two more with a child at the bottom left, a group of travellers clambering up a steep path at centre-left. Guo Xi wrote that mountains have moods, and that a real painter must walk into them for years before daring to paint them. He signed and dated this painting in 1072, very rare for Song landscapes. Now at National Palace Museum, Taipei @national_palace_museum