Ode to Goddess of the Luo River， a Eastern Jin Dynasty（317.420） hand scroll by Gu Kaizhi， ink and color on silk， 27.1cm×572.8cm， in the collection of the Palace Museum， Beijing.
Gu Kaizhi（345.ca. 406）， born in Eastern Jin Dynasty，was one of China’s four great artists in pre-Tang Dynasty period. Knowledgeable and talented， he was particularly proficient at painting and was acclaimed as great master of painting art by people of later ages. He generated drastic and far-reaching impacts on traditional Chinese painting at that time and of later generations.
Despite a reproduction in the Song Dynasty（960.1279）， it well preserves painting styles in the six dynasties and accordingly becomes a valuable document to study Gu Kaizhi’s painting art.
This painting drew materials from Ode to Goddess of the Luo River， a literature masterpiece of Cao Zhi， a great littérateur in the Three Kingdoms period（220.280）。 It depicts the scene that Cao Zhi meets with the Goddess of the Luo River at riverside. It’s ingeniously conceived and drawn in vivid approaches. The goddess is graceful， beautiful， and appears in all her splendor. The painting shows author’s boundless joy when meeting with the goddess and enormous sadness at farewell.
It was previously preserved in the palace of the Qing Dynasty（1644.1911）。 As one of a few existing ancient Chinese paintings， it is a national cultural relic indeed.
