Artist

Dong Yuan

Portrait of Dong Yuan
Portrait of Dong Yuan

Yang Wu, 934–962

Dong Yuan was a Yang Wu Ming dynasty painting artist. 9 works are cataloged here, principally at National Palace Museum, most of them ink works. Dong Yuan was born in Nanjing.

Dong Yuan (Chinese: 董源; pinyin: Dǒng Yuán; Wade–Giles: Tung Yüan; Gan: dung3 ngion4; c. 934 – c. 962), courtesy name Shuda (叔達), was a Chinese painter of the Southern Tang dynasty. He was born in Zhongling (钟陵; present-day Jinxian County, Jiangxi Province). Dong Yuan was active in the Southern Tang, a dynasty of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.

He was from Nanjing, which was a center for culture and the arts. He was known for both figure and landscape paintings, and exemplified the elegant style which would become the standard for brush painting in China for the next nine centuries. He and his pupil Juran (巨然) were the founders of the Southern style of landscape painting, known as the Jiangnan Landscape style.

Together with Jing Hao and Guan Tong of the Northern style they constituted the four seminal painters of that time. As with many artists in China, his profession was as an official, here he studied the existing styles of Li Sixun and Wang Wei. However, he added to these masters' techniques; he included more sophisticated perspective.

Works by Dong Yuan

Collections represented

Catalog records compiled from museum open-access collections; the artworks shown are in the public domain. Spotted an error in this record? Tell us.