Page 184 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

194 Sung Hui-tsung (reigned 101-
1125), Tht Fivt-Colour Paraktrl
Hanging «roll Ink «id colour on silk.
Academy of Painting); yet no such institution is ever mentioned
Northern Sung Dvrusty. 7
. . ._ , , .
in the Northern Sung history, and if such a body did in fact exist,
it was presumably a subdivision of the Hanlin Academy.
The tradition of direct imperial patronage culminated in Hui-
tsung (1101-1125), the last emperor of Northern Sung, whose
passion for pictures and antiquities blinded him to the perils into
which his country was drifting. In 1 104 he set up an official School
of Painting (Hua-hsiieh) in the palace, but in mo this was abol-
ished and painting was once more put under the Hanlin Academy.
Hui-tsung kept tight control over the painters at court. He handed
out the subjects to be painted and set examinations as though the
painters were candidates for administrative posts. The theme was
generally a line from a poem, and distinction went to the most in-
genious and allusive answer. When, for example, he chose the
theme "A Tavern in a Bamboo Grove by a Bridge," the winner did
not put in the tavern at all but simply suggested it by a signboard
set among the bamboos. Thus, what Hui-tsung required of these
artists was not mere academic realism so much as the kind of in-
tellectual agility, the avoidance of the obvious, the play upon ideas
that was expected also of literary scholars. But the emperor, him-
self a painter of great ability, tolerated no indiscipline in the ranks.
He imposed a dictatorship of form and taste upon his academi-
cians as rigid as that of Le Brun over the artists working for Louis
164
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