The late Northern Song artist and collector Wang Shen (c. 1048-after 1104) created a landscape painting entitled Mistry River and Layered Peaks in the late 1080s after he returned from the political exile with his friends Su Shi (1036-1101) and Wang Gong (1048-after 1104). He gave the painting to Wang Gong, and Wang Shen and Su Shi wrote poems after the painting. Both painting and poems became very popular and widely known among the literati from the Northern Song period on as the embodiment of literati tradition in which verbal and pictorial images interact and enrich the meaning of the art work. The painting title, Misty River and Layered Peaks, was repeated by famous literati painters such as Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), Shen Zhou (1427-1509). Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), and Dong Qichang (1555-1636), and became an important landscape theme which inspired later artists.*br* Literary records evidence that Wang Shen painted more than one version of Misty River and Layered Peaks in handscroll format, and the landscape painted in blue and green manner now in the Shanghai Museum collection is quite possibly the painting that Wang Gong owned. Although unsigned and without seals of either Wang Shen or Wang Gong, it is one of the most securely documented of all extant Northern Song painting. It entered the emperor Huizong's imperial collection and has official seals of the Xuanhe era (1119-1125) and a title inscribed immediately to the right of the painting by Huizong.*br* The monumental style of landscape which prevailed among the court painters of the Northern Song reached its peak during the reign of emperor Shenzong (1067-1085) with Guo Xi (c. 1001-1090). Stylistic comparison of Mistry River and Layered Peaks with other Northern Song landscapes clearly shows that Wang's painting reflects technical and stylistic changes that occurred in landscape painting at the turn of the twelfth century.*br* As a privileged imperial relative and one of the leading members of the literati circle, Wang Shen most probably had access to old masterworks and acquired his knowledge of painting from them. By adopting the landscape style of Li Cheng (919-967) and reviving the archaic blue and green mode of the Tang dynasty. Wang Shen created his own modes of landscape. The composition with vast expanse of water and soaring mountains is a visual presentation of the title. It also indicated the departure from the monumental landscape structure and expressed the separation and loneliness he experienced during a period of painful exile, thus expanded the range of meaning and style in Chinese landscape painting.*br* Created at a time when scholar-officials were turning to painting as a serious form of self-cultivation and working out their new styles and genres of painting to distinguish themselves from the professional tradition, Wang Shen's painting demonstrated that the art of landscape began to convey the individual human mind and experience, which marked the beginning of the literati landscape tradition in China.