What painting techniques did Fan Kuan use in Travelers Among Mountains and Streams?

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ceremonial hu — Chinese painting Drawing of ancestral offering scenes (ritual archery, sericulture, hunting, and warfare) cast on a ceremonial bronze *hu,* 6th–5th century bc, Zhou dynasty. In the Palace Museum, Peking.

In the masterpiece Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, the 11th-century painter Fan Kuan utilized a powerful and close-textured brushwork style characterized by the use of "raindrop" strokes.1

These strokes are a specific type of cun—the brushstrokes or dabs used in Chinese painting to provide texture and character to pictorial elements like mountains and rocks. By employing this stippling technique, Fan Kuan was able to render the details of the landscape with remarkable realism and monumentality, effectively capturing the rugged, towering nature of the terrain.12