Liu Zongyuan

The visual analogue to the Liu Zongyuan poem is the typical Chinese landscape with looming mountains and a very small boat with a fisherman. The old man is a sage or hermit, who has been in government service but now has either retired or been banished to an isolated place, as the poet himself was.  There are, in fact, paintings with this poem written on them. And I would guess that this motif was in paintings even before the poem was written. The poem reads as an ekphrasis, either as a description of paintings already existing or as instructions for painting such paintings. We must have a contrast between the immensity of nature and smallness of the figure in the foreground.