Juran

Juran (巨然), a Chinese painter from the Nanjing region, was one of the great landscape artists of 10th-century China. He was active mainly around 960-980. Together with Dong Yuan, a contemporary whom he is said to have followed, he is placed at the origin of what would later be called the Southern School of landscape painting.

A Buddhist monk, his works were known throughout China from his youth. Around 975, when the last ruler of the Southern Tang was taken as a prisoner to Kaifeng, the Song capital, Juran followed him and settled at the Kaibao monastery in that city. His output is usually divided into two phases: an early one devoted to the landscapes of his native province, with elongated mountains and rounded groves, and a later one, painted far from home, in which his style became more refined and spiritual.

Like Dong Yuan, he rendered nature with an impressionistic technique, but his images are softer and even more hazy. He used light, flexible ink, with gradations that model rounded hills, and dense, dark-toned trees set upon them. The critic Guo Ruoxu, in his Tuhua Jianwenzhi (1074), praised him as a skilled landscapist, especially in his handling of misty atmosphere and vast panoramas of mountains and rivers.

Among the works attributed to him, the handscroll Seeking the Tao in Autumn Mountains is considered by many to be one of the most authentic. His influence can be seen in the later tradition of Chinese landscape painting.