Southern School
[2] According to William Watson, while the Northern School contains "the painters who favour clear, emphatic structure in their compositions, with the use of explicit perspective devices", the Southern School "cultivate a more intimate style of landscape bathed in cloud and mist, in which pleasing calligraphic forms tend to take the place of conventions established for the representation of rocks, trees, etc.
[3] A more philosophical distinction is that the Southern School painters "were thought to have sought the inner realities and expressed their own lofty natures" while the Northern "painted only the outward appearance of things, the worldly and decorative".
The stereotypical literati painter lived in retirement in the mountains or other rural areas, not entirely isolated, but immersed in natural beauty and far from mundane concerns.
They were also lovers of culture, hypothetically enjoying and taking part in all Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar as touted by Confucianism, that is, painting, calligraphy, music, and games of skill and strategy.
[9] During the Qing period (1644–1911), the canons of classical Chinese painting mainly derived from the criteria set out by Dong Qichang, Mo Shilong (1537?–1587), and Chen Jiru (1558–1639).
[11] Beginning in the 18th century, the attitudes of the Chinese literati (the scholar-bureaucrat in retirement who devotes himself entirely to a love of culture) began to be taken up by Japanese artists.
Outside of native Japanese inspirations, these bunjin gained Chinese influence only through woodblock-printed art books which attempted to reproduce and communicate the Southern School ideals and methods.
