Ni Zan was a Yuan dynasty painter and poet whose spare, almost empty landscapes set a new ideal of the literati style. With a few rocks, a leaning tree and a sliver of distant shore, painted in dry-brush ink on paper, he produced some of the most quietly influential works in Chinese art.
Best known for: Spare ink landscapes, dry-brush technique
Impressionism
39
Light, weather and modern Paris on canvas.
Post-Impressionism
26
Bold colour and personal vision past the Impressionists.
Japanese Woodblock
23
Mount Fuji, the Great Wave and Edo street life.
Renaissance
34
Italian and northern masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Botanical & Natural History
25
Plates of birds, flowers and insects drawn from life.
Pre-Raphaelite & Symbolist
20
Late Victorian myth, dream and gothic figure.
Art Nouveau Posters
14
Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec in the great Paris poster era.
Dutch Golden Age
15
Vermeer, Rembrandt and the quiet light of 1600s Holland.
Maps & Celestial Charts
4
Engraved world maps and star atlases from the age of exploration.
Romanticism
23
Storms, ruins and sublime landscapes from Turner, Friedrich and Goya.
Chinese Landscape
4
Song, Yuan and Ming masters of the mountain-and-water tradition.
Persian, Mughal & Indian
2
Miniatures and album leaves from the great Eastern courts.
Modernism & Abstraction
4
Hilma af Klint, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich and the abstract pioneers.