Fan Kuan's masterpiece and best known painting…

Fan Kuan's masterpiece and best known painting is his Travelers among Mountains and Streams, a large hanging scroll.

A seminal work of the Northern Song school, it establishes an ideal in monumental landscape painting to which later artists will return time and again for inspiration.

Fan Kuan based the painting on the Taoist principle of reclusion, the composition emphasizes the monumentality of nature.

A packhorse train can barely be seen emerging from a wood at the base of a huge precipice.

Despite the fact that the painting represents an ideal example of the achievements of the Northern Song landscape styles, the painting still represents several archaic conventions dating back to the Tang Dynasty.

The composition remains dominated by a central massif.

The foliage are composed of mechanically repeated and narrow texture strokes.