Ye Xiaoyan
Restrained Ma Yuan-style small figure scenes
Ye Xiaoyan(叶肖岩) was a painter from the Song Dynasty, originally from Qiantang (now Hangzhou), active during the early 13th century in the Southern Song Bao You period (1253-1258). He specialized in copying works and creating small figure scenes in the style of Ma Yuan. His style resembled Ma Yuan’s but was somewhat more restrained, and he often used wet brush techniques to lightly color rocks and mountains. Very few of his works have survived, and there is little recorded about his life. A friend, Gu Feng, even wrote a poem for him saying, 'The brushwork is wonderfully divine, capturing faces truly,' suggesting he was a modest folk painter. Ye Xiaoyan’s representative work, the album "Ten Views of West Lake," is now housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The album is painted on silk with colors, each leaf measuring 23.9 cm in height and 20.2 cm in width. It combines poetry and painting to depict the ten scenic spots of West Lake. The mountains and rocks are painted using the 'da fu pi' axe-cut method, focusing on shading, with simple but elegant brushwork. This album is clearly documented in the "Shiqu Baoji Xu Bian".