China Meets the Met

The Met museum in Manhattan has turned a large part of its Asian art floors over to a temporary exhibition of all the finest Chinese paintings from its vaults: “Masterpieces of Chinese Painting From the Metropolitan Collection” will be on until October 11.

The paintings on display span roughly a thousand years, from the end of the first millennium a.d. to the end of the second. Nonetheless, the paintings’ contents are remarkably homogenous: Nearly all are landscapes—the Chinese countryside, verdant, multi-peaked mountains adorned with streams and waterfalls. As the exhibit placards point out, the Chinese word for landscape painting literally means “mountain and water.”