Page 150 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

161 Attributed to Sung Hui-tsung —
the Chen-yen (Shingon) sect, painted by Li Chen, a contemporary
(1101-112$). Court Ladies Preparing Silk
Detail ofa handscroU after a T'ang ofChou Fang. Long forgotten in China, the work of this artist has
Dynasty original. Ink and colour on
been cherished in Japan for its austere and noble evocation of the
silk. Sung Dynasty.
spirit of mystical Buddhism.
Court artists were not always treated with the respect they felt
was due to them. Chang Yen-yuan tells of the indignity to which
the great Yen Li-pen was once subjected, when he was rudely
summoned—the courtiers used the term hua shih, roughly equiv-
alent to "master craftsman painter" (a term that would never be
applied to a scholar, a high official, or a gentleman)—to sketch
some ducks that were swimming about on the palace lake in front
of T'ai-tsung, after which he advised his sons and pupils never to
take up the art. Ming Huang was passionately fond of horses, par-
ticularly the tough, stocky ponies from the western regions, and is
said to have had over forty thousand in his stables. The striking
painting of one of his favourites, Night White, has long been at-
tributed to the noted horse specialist Han Kan. Tethered to a post,
the horse rears up with eyes dilated as though the painter had star-
tled him. All but the head, neck, and forequarters are the work of
a later restorer, but enough remains to suggest a dynamic energy
of movement and solidity of modelling such as we find also in the
best of the T'ang pottery figurines.
LANDSCAPE PAINTING During these prosperous years, when painters were busily occu-
pied with Buddhist frescoes, portrait painting, and other socially
useful activities, their hearts, if not their feet, were roaming the
hills and valleys far from the glitter of the capital. The tradition of
landscape painting which was later to rise to such supreme heights
had been born in the Six Dynasties, but it had advanced little
partly because of the ever-increasing demand for Buddhist icons,
partly because artists were then still struggling with the most ele-
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