Page 366 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

112 CHINESE ART.
have excelled too at all periods in the painting of animals and
birds, especially of birds and flying insects in conjunction with
flowers. These are reproduced with much feeling and fidelity,
in styles varying with the epoch, but always exhibiting a mastery
of the brush such as only constant practice could give. Some
artists have concentrated all their power in one direction, devoting
their lives, for instance, to ideal outlines of the graceful bamboo
in every phase of movement in black and white, or, again, to pictures,
in colours, of the regal blossoms of the many varieties of the tree
peony, a favourite garden flower in China.
The introduction of Buddhism in the first century of our era
was indeed a capital fact in the history of Chinese art, although it can
hardly be said to have created that pictorial art, as some have held.
The importantn://e of Buddhism has baen the endowment of an testhetic
art already existing with the processes, principles and canonical
models of a new religion inspired with novel motives and alien ideals.
The first Buddhist painters, who were either Indian pilgrims, or
Chinese bonzes trained by them in the early monasteries, devoted
themselves to painting as a work of piety, and their productions,
imbued with religious feeling, with pious simplicity and mystic
candour, were veritable acts of faith and adoration. Although
strictly religious, they thus reached a high poetic standard, and
penetrated far into the realms of morality, by the sincerity of the
emotions they sought to picture, by their heartfelt earnestness,
by their nobility of thought and ideal detachment. But the
naivete, lofty aspiration and divine feeling required in religious
art were soon found wanting, till the scenes in the life of Sakya-
Muni, which had been a source of such pure inspiration to the
artists of the fiist epoch, became only pretexts for studied com-
positions or for a brilliant display of figures. Religious thought
revealed itself nowhere in the slightest degree among all the senti-
;
ments the artist aimed to express not one was supernatural.
Historical painting has generally confined itself to the anecdotic