Zhao Cangyun

Zhao Cangyun was a Chinese painter active in the late 13th and early 14th century, during the transition from the Song to the Yuan dynasty. A member of the Song royal family who lived through the Mongol conquest, he withdrew into seclusion and is said never to have married or held office. Almost nothing of his life is documented apart from his surviving handscroll, Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao Entering the Tiantai Mountains, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The work illustrates a Daoist legend in delicate monochrome ink, reviving the refined linear drawing style of the Northern Song scholar-painter Li Gonglin.