Page 125 - Irving Collection Part II Chinese Art

This pair of screens is showing the Dog-chasing Event, an equestrian roofed enclosure. This is also the dignitaries’ viewing stand. At the
sport which originated as a form of martial-arts training as early as the center sits a scorekeeper. The artist provides a panoply of props and
thirteenth century. By the early seventeenth century, however, the sport was characters: archers, dog handlers, judges, old and young spectators, men
virtually defunct. After dog-chasing was revived in 1646, the complicated and women. The variety of costume, gesture and facial expression is
rules of conduct were rigorously codifed and illustrated manuals depicting infnitely entertaining.
the sport came into circulation. The sport transmogrifed into a grand annual
afair and became a popular theme on screens of the late-seventeenth and The sport was important as target practice and as training in military
eighteenth centuries. Here, a crowd of interested spectators from all walks etiquette. Diferent schools or families evolved their own sets of rules. An
of life are shown in a dazzling display of costumes and amusements. event in 1489 records the use of more than 150 dogs and three teams of
archers, each with twelve riders. The competition went into abrupt decline in
The dog-chasing event is shown in two stages. There is a deliberate the second half of the sixteenth century as it may have seemed superfuous
contrast between the suspenseful preliminary stage of the game preceding in an era of violent civil war. There is a long hiatus between the last recorded
the release of the dog and the dramatic action at left where archers and event in 1576 and the 1646 revival in the Shiba district of Edo (Tokyo) on the
attendants converge to drive the feeing dog toward the scorekeeper’s order of Shimazu Tadahisa, daimyo of the Satsuma fef.

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