Viewing the Moon under a Pine Tree

The theme and composition portrayed in this painting first appeared during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) on small square album leaves or round fans that occupied only about one square foot. The most famous artist associated with such works is the Southern Song court artist Ma Yuan. Many paintings, like this one, bear old attributions to him. This is a later Qing-dynasty copy, evident from the much larger size and vertical orientation of the painting, which departs greatly from the intimately scaled Southern Song prototypes. Nevertheless, one distinctive feature that the later artist has preserved is the asymmetrical weighting of the composition toward one of the lower corners, a style so linked with Ma Yuan that he was known as “One-Corner Ma.”