There is general agreement that the two finest surviving examples of early Chinese monumental landscape painting are believably signed works by Fan Kuan (990-1030) and Guo Xi (1000-1090).
The earliest known painting in the China area is that found in prehistoric rock art and on Neolithic pottery. Fragment of Shang period wall paintings have also been recovered.
The trace of painting also found on pottery tiles, painted tiles, tomb frescoes, and painted lacquer baskets in the Han Dynasty (3 BC – 3 AD).
The first known painters dated from the Han Dynasty but the first paintings to have survived are from the Tang Dynasty.
One of the famous figure was painter Cheng Hongshou (1599-1651) during of the late Ming Dynasty.
Chen’s paintings fetched such high prices in his lifetimes that ‘several thousand’ imitators made a living manufacturing works under his name, selling their wares in places as distant as Samarkand, Tibet, eastern Mongolia, Korea and Japan.
Early Chinese painting
