What season is the scene depicted in Qingming Riverside Painting

The scene depicted in Qingming Riverside is spring.

The people in the painting are wearing thin clothes and light hats, while the trees are sprouting tender green leaves and new buds. The painting also features items that mark spring, such as willow, straw hats, peach blossoms, and vegetables. Qingming Festival is one of the 24 traditional Chinese solar terms, usually around April 5 on the Gregorian calendar, and also marks the watershed of spring in China, when people have begun to prepare for agricultural activities such as spring plowing and reclamation.

With delicate brushstrokes and superb painting techniques, Qingming Shanghe Tu depicts the social life and urban scenes of this period, with lively markets, officials' yachts, commercial activities of outdoor stores, itinerant entertainers, pedestrians rushing along the road, and even many vibrant and emotionally rich detail depictions of pet dogs, rats, ants, and more.

Author of Qingming Riverside Scroll:

The author of Qingming Riverside Scroll was the ancient Chinese painter Zhang Zeduan. Zhang Zeduan was a Song dynasty court painter, born in 1085 A.D. and died in 1145 A.D. He was the grandson of Li Yuan, a scholar in the third year of the Yongxi era (1009 A.D.) His father, Zhang Xuanfeng, also served as a court official, and passed down certain painting skills in his family. Zhang Zeduan specialized in painting a wide range of subjects, including figures, landscapes, flowers and birds, and was especially renowned for his paintings of urban scenes and other subjects.

The origin of Qingming Riverside Drawing:

According to historical records, Zhang Zeduan visited many places in order to create Qingming Riverside Drawing, especially Kaifeng City in Henan Province, where he made a large number of sketches and vignettes and sketched the cityscape of the time during the Qingming Festival, and then went back to his own study to organize the work and create this masterpiece in the history of modern art.

Value of Qingming Riverside Drawing

The Qingming Riverside Drawing is a part of China's cultural heritage, and has a very high preservation and inheritance value. From flowing into the folk to encountering war, the painting has gone through several ups and downs, and undergone many restorations and renovations, until now it can be better preserved and studied, and is one of the important symbols of Chinese history and culture.