Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Wang Ximeng
Young Northern Song painting student taught by Emperor Huizong, who at eighteen presented the blue-and-green landscape scroll A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains
A desk holds an unrolled sheet bearing three bold black ink strokes, with a rack of many brushes above it, a stone ink slab and ink stick, a porcelain bowl, a red lacquer box, a dish of red seal paste and a paperweight; a small seated figure shows through a round window onto bamboo.
Also known as Ximeng
Everything known about Wang Ximeng comes from Cai Jing's colophon on *A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains* (*Qianli jiangshan tu*). Written in 1113, it says that Ximeng, then eighteen, had been a student at the painting academy and was later placed in the palace archives, where the paintings he offered were not yet skilful; Emperor Huizong judged him teachable and instructed him personally, and within half a year he presented this scroll, which the emperor then gave to Cai Jing. The silk handscroll, about fifty-one centimetres high and nearly twelve metres long, builds ranges of peaks, rivers, villages and bridges in layered azurite and malachite. Cai's colophon gives only the name Ximeng; the surname Wang first appears in a poem by the early Qing collector Song Luo, who also claimed the painter died in his twenties, a statement with no other support. The scroll entered the Qing palace collection and is now in the Palace Museum in Beijing.
Life and times
Dates 1096 CE–death unknown