LI T'ANG

born c. 1080, c. 1130 Pinyin Li Tang major Chinese painter who lived during both the Northern and the Southern Sung dynasties and established a style of painting that became the base for the academy-style landscape of the Southern Sung. He earned the highest rank in the academy of painting of Emperor Hui Tsung, and, after the North fell to the Mongols, went to the South and entered the academy of Emperor Sung Kao Tsung. His landscapesof which one dated 1124 (National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan) is the most reliably ascribedserve as a vital link between the earlier, and essentially Northern, variety of monumental landscape, and the more lyrical Southern style of the Ma-Hsia school. Li T'ang perfected the brush texture stroke known as the ax stroke, which gives a tactile sense to painted rocks and suggests the precise and comprehensive reality that Southern Sung artists sought to give their landscapes.