Page 185 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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XIV, who were in much the same position. The penalty for inde-
pendence was dismissal. For all his talent and enthusiasm, his in-
fluence cannot have been beneficial. The imposition of a rigid or-
thodoxy laid the foundation for a decorative, painstaking "palace
style" which was to govern court taste until modern times, while
his insatiable and somewhat unscrupulous demands as a collec-
tor—demands which no owner could refuse—helped to ensure
the destruction, in the disastrous events of 1125/27, of most of the
still-surviving masterpieces of ancient art.
Whenever Hui-tsung produced a masterpiece, the painters in
the academy vied with each other in copying it and if they were
lucky succeeded in having their versions inscribed with the em-
peror's own cypher. So closely indeed did they model their work
on his that it is now almost impossible to disentangle the one from
the other, though some attempts have been made to do so. It
would even be wrong to assume that the better the painting the
more likely it is to be from the imperial hand. The pictures asso-
ciated with his name are for the most part quiet, careful studies of
birds on branches A Dove on a Peach Tree, Sparrows on Bamboo,
and so on — painted with exquisite precision, delicate colour, and
faultless placing. Often their beauty is enhanced by the emperor's
highly elegant calligraphy which, we may be sure, was not infre-
quently applied also as a mark of approval to paintings executed
by members of the academy. A typical product of this sophisti-
cated circle is the famous Five-Colour Parakeet, which bears a poem
and signature penned by the imperial brush. This exquisitely bal-
anced picture reveals a certain stiffness (much clearer in the origi-
nal than in the photograph), an anxiety to be correct at all costs
just the qualities we might expect to find in Hui-tsung himself.
The art of flower painting which Hui-tsung and his academicians BIRD AND
practised was not, in origin, wholly Chinese. Buddhist banner FLOWER PAINTING
paintings brought from India and central Asia were richly set
about with flowers, painted in a technique which influenced the
latc-sixth-ccntury master Chang Seng-yu. Speaking of some of
Chang s paintings in a temple at Nanking, a T'ang author had
written: "All over the gate of the temple 'flowcrs-in-relief are
painted. . . . Such flowers are done in a technique brought here
from India. They arc painted in vermilion, malachite greens, and
azurite blues. Looking at them from a distance, one has the illu-
sion that they arc [carved] in relief, but close at hand they are seen
to be flat." 4 T'ang Buddhist art is rich in this decorative style of
flower painting, but by the tenth century it had become an art in its
own right. Later painters loved to animate their flower studies
with birds, and thus "birds and flowers" (hua-niao) became recog-
nised as an independent category in the repertoire.
The tenth-century master Huang Ch'uan is said to have in-
vented a revolutionary technique offlower painting at the court of
Wang Chien in Chengtu. He worked almost entirely in delicate,
transparent washes of colour, sometimes laid one over the other, a
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