Page 67 - Christies March 15 2017 Fujita Museum

The stallion depicted in Horse, a work attributed to Han Gan, shares a similar posture with that of
Pacing A Horse now in the collection of the Shanghai Museum, which is attributed to Later Liang-
artist Zhao Yan of the Five Dynasties, providing an interesting subject of comparison and study.
The composition of the last section (i.e. the part following Emperor Qianlong’s inscription) of Li
Gonglin’s Treaty of Bianqiao is nearly identical to Yuan dynasty Chen Jizhi’s work of the same title in
the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, while the preceding section is almost 400 cm longer
than its counterpart, accounting for approximately one third of the entire length. Hence Li’s work
afords a rare glimpse into a fuller representation of a traditional subject matter known as Bianqiao
huimeng, i.e. the historical event of Li Shimin (then Prince Qin, who later became Emperor Taizong of
the Tang dynasty) forging an alliance with the Turks in the ninth year of the Wude reign (AD 626) at
the Bianqiao in the suburb of Chang’an. Extant dragon paintings in ink inscribed by and with the seals
of the Southern Song-artist Chen Rong, such as the handscroll of Nine Dragons in the collection of
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Dragon in Ink from the Guangdong Provincial Museum, display
a wide variety of calligraphic styles, and the inscription on Six Dragons from the Fujita Museum
also shows a style of its own, all of which should make yet another worthwhile subject for further
discussion.

Well catalogued in Shiqu Baoji, the six classical paintings from the Fujita collection are, therefore,
exceptionally rare examples for our research into the history of both Chinese painting and Emperor
Qianlong’s connoisseurship.

Joseph Chang

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