Vol. 1 No. 3 (2025)

Research Articles

From Guo Xi to Shi Tao: A Study on the Inheritance and Evolution of the "Four Seasons View" in Landscape Painting

Published 2025-12-01

  • Shuolin Wang

Shuolin Wang
Northwest Normal University image/svg+xml

Abstract

Since ancient times, the "Four Seasons" has been a common theme in traditional Chinese landscape painting. The changes of spring, summer, autumn, and winter embody people's different emotions. From material images to "the creation of artistic conception", and from reality to emptiness, painters use specific natural scenes to arouse viewers' different feelings towards the four seasons.The "Four Seasons View" has been discussed in many poems and treatises. Focusing on the classic painting theories of Guo Xi's Notes on Landscape Painting from the Lofty Message of Forests and Streams and Shi Tao's Bitter Gourd Monk's Painting Manual·Four Seasons Chapter, this study explores Shi Tao's inheritance and development of Guo Xi's "Four Seasons View". Finally, it reveals that the inheritance and evolution of this concept not only reflects the deepening of the traditional landscape painting's essence of expressing the "mind of forests and streams", but also mirrors the historical transformation of painting in the early Qing Dynasty from representing nature to expressing one's inner thoughts. Shi Tao's theory not only pushed landscape painting into a brand-new poetic realm, but also provided an important reference for understanding the aesthetic connotation of Chinese painting.

Keywords

Guo Xi, Shi Tao, Four Seasons View, Inheritance and Evolution

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