Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring
Ma Yuan (c. 1200)
“The theme [is] the conscious enjoyment of nature. A scholar walking with his servant on a path along a stream bank stops momentarily to watch two orioles in the wind-blown willow. A verse couplet is written at the right: ‘Brushed by his sleeves, wild flowers dance in the wind; fleeing from him, the hidden birds cut short their songs’.... The profusion of interesting detail found in the work of... earlier landscapists is gone. The result of this rigorous elimination of the unessential is not austerity, however, but poetry; like the T’ang lyricists and the Japanese haiku poets, Ma Yuan envelops his subject in an aura of feeling with an extreme economy of means, relying upon the emotional associations of his images and the evocative power of the emptiness surrounding them.”(James Cahill, Chinese Painting, ch. 7)

As usual, Ma focuses on one corner (his nickname was “One-corner Ma”), leaving the rest for space, and for the viewer’s imagination.