Li Song (1166–1243), a native of Qiantang (present-day Hangzhou), Song Dynasty. Born into poverty, he worked as a carpenter in his youth. Good painting, quite far rope ink. He was adopted as an adopted son by the court painter Li Congxun, taught painting skills, and eventually became a generation of famous artists. The painting academy of the Three Dynasties (1190-1264) of Song Guangzong, Song Ningzong and Song Lizong was to be edicted, and he was respected as the "Old Painter of the Three Dynasties". Gonghua characters are explained, and they have to be trained from the will, especially in boundary painting. The figure paintings are meticulous and energetic; the paintings of flowers and birds are exquisite and rigorous, and they do not feel cumbersome and sluggish; landscape paintings are operated by craftsmen, leaving the image outside, fascinating; boundary paintings do not use boundary rulers, and the rules of the palaces and pavilions are prepared with rope and ink, which is extraordinary. The subject matter of painting is rich and colorful, from the court to the folk, from the city to the countryside, from production to life, from eating and drinking to entertainment, from the Xianshan to the Dragon Palace, from history to reality, which are reflected in the paintings, to reflect the rural terroir and peasant life. For example, Ming Emperor Fighting Diagram and Flower Basket Diagram; there are custom paintings with white depictions and pale colors, such as Cargo Lang Diagram; there are also landscape paintings rendered with ink, such as West Lake Diagram and so on.
His works include Jiading's four-year (1211) volume of "Cargo Lang Tu", "Flower Basket Diagram" page, "Skeleton Illusion Diagram" scroll hidden in the National Palace Museum; "West Lake Map" scroll in the Shanghai Museum; "Listening to Ruan Tu", "Night Moon Looking at the Lake Map", and Li Song's landscape sketch painting "Water Temple ZhaoLiang Map" and other collections in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. His works also include "Chunxi Crossing Bull Map", "Futian Map", "Lotus Picking Map" and "Guan Tide Map", etc., and the posterity of the subject matter of the painter titled his painting: "Li Shi is the most knowledgeable about the interest of the peasant family".
Li Song's genre paintings are more well-known, he has painted many rural life customs paintings that express the life of the lower class, depicting the lives of working people as aesthetic objects, which has important significance in the history of the development of ancient Chinese art. There are many surviving books in his "Cargo Lang Tu", the best of which is a volume collected by the Palace Museum. This painting depicts a freight man surrounded by children in the countryside, full of strong local atmosphere. Hidden in the "Skeleton Illusion" axis hidden in the Palace Museum, the characters have very good expressions, the clothes are wrinkled and rat-tailed, mostly straight lines, thin and powerful.
The "West Lake Picture Scroll" is a Chinese painting work by the Chinese Song Dynasty painter Li Song, this West Lake picture is not necessarily the most exquisite picture scroll depicting the West Lake since ancient times, but it is the work that best illustrates the whole picture of the ancient West Lake. Although gong pen painting is not as good as ink freehand, as a human flesh camera, Li Song has done it.
According to The Fifth Volume of Li Yan's "Southern Song Dynasty Painting Catalogue", Zhu Yuanzhang once wrote an inscription on this "West Lake Map" and praised it, as a Taizu Emperor who had not received compulsory education and relied on self-study to get rid of blindness, he was usually very interesting, and rarely engaged in literature and art in takeaway, and this seemed to be the only direct comment on painting works that people knew Zhu Yuanzhang.