Chinese Picture Stone, Framed

No brush touched this mountain range. The stone did the work itself.

This framed picture stone comes from China, and its age is indeterminate, as one might expect of geology. Chinese collectors prized such slices of natural stone alongside scholar's rocks, reading landscapes into the veining and setting them in frames for contemplation. The record says this one was neither pieced together nor colored. Ridges of ochre, rust and umber climb beneath a pale gold sky, inside a heavy rounded frame of huali wood. Twenty-nine inches wide and twenty-two high.

Eons in the making, and still no signature.