Strolling in a Misty Valley 1649 Mei Qing Chinese Mei Qing was born into a prominent family in Xuancheng, Anhui Province, about seventy-five miles south of Nanjing. Mei followed the family tradition of scholarship. By age sixteen he had become a prefectural-level student (zhusheng), and in 1642 he published his first collection of poems. He lived in retirement during the first decade of the Qing dynasty.Strolling in a Misty Valley is Meis earliest extant work, done shortly after he moved to a new family residence in a scenic area south of Xuancheng. The painting shows him working in the dry, linear style typical of a number of late Ming painters, with angular rock formations and craggy pines loosely organized along a serpentine stream. Its style vaguely recalls the landscape forms of Huang Gongwang (1269-1354) and the spare brush idiom of Ni Zan (1306-1374). Painted just five years after the fall of the Ming dynasty, its allusions to these recluse-artists, who lived under the Mongol Y