Secluded Home in a Wooded Glen

In the middle of a small grove of trees a man can be seen sitting at a writing table in a house. The trees surround the house and their forms lead up to the cliffs of a flat peak of rock that towers over the landscape. The sky behind the mountain peaks is empty. The extreme vertical composition (it is a scroll painting) emphasizes the height of the mountains and the small size of the man's house. The house contains the only straight lines in the picture thus setting it off from the twisting shapes of the pine trees and the jagged lines of the peaks. The painting is not a realistic rendering of a place. The place might exist and resemble the painting, but everything is exaggerated by means of minimizing distractions so that the eye concentrates on the basics of rough peaks, tangled trees and simple house.

Wang Meng did not use a great deal of color in the picture. The paper has an overall brownish tinge to it and the majority of the forms in the picture either feature no color at all or they are in browns that are a little brighter than the background. There is also some dark, dull green in the trees and in plants (resembling small evergreens) growing on the rocky cliffs. Rocks are shadowed and given much of their interior form by means of a dotting effect with black ink. The similarity of coloring throughout the painting creates an atmosphere that holds all the elements together

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g in peaceful seclusion away from a warring society, and there were depictions of the actual secluded homes of the painters and their friends. Examples of the reclusion genre extend back at least as far as the middle of the tenth century and it survived in every period and most styles through the nineteenth century. Cahill offers examples of the genre of reclusion that bear basic similarities to Wang's painting (towering cliffs and small house in the woods) even though they were painted centuries earlier or later and have a number of different moods. Most of the paintings are peaceful while only a few make the seclusion look harsh and dangerous. Some, like this one of Wang's, strike a balance between internal peace and surrounding threats. Most of Wang Meng's reclusion landscapes belong to the sub-genre of "portrayals of people's retirement dwellings, or villas, with the surrounding scenery " (Cahill, Three 47). They were usually painted for the owners of the places and were given the names the owners gave to the retreats. Wang Meng's greatest contemporary, Ni Tsan, also painted such pictures but his style was very different and he used minimal forms located in open spaces to indicate the feeling of isolation. Wang Meng w
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2044
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)