Page 378 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

124 CHINESE ART.

fallen in love, on the village wall. The story goes that the artist,
learned in folklore, struck a thorn into the picture through the
cardiac region ; the girl instantly suffered from pain in her heart,
which stopped when he removed the thorn, and she forthwith
yielded to his plea.
Ku K'ai-chih interests us especially because a roll of brown silk
nine and three-quarters inches wide, eleven feet four and a half
inches long, painted by him, is now in the British Museum, a most
important document in the history of pictorial art, which has been
so well described by Mr. L. Binyon in the Burlington Magazine,
January, 1904. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of
this picture, which is signed by the artist, and authenticated by
a series of seals of imperial collections and by certificates of cele-
brated critics through whose hands it has passed. It is entitled
" Illustrations of the Admonitions of the Lady Historian," re-
ferring to a well-known work by Pan Chao, the learned sister of
Pan Ku, who lived in the first century of our era. It is included
in the Hsiian ho hua p'u, the catalogue of the twelfth century,
in the number of nine pictures of Ku K'ai-chih in the imperial
palace at K'ai-feng-fu at that time, and comes no doubt recently
from the palace at Peking, as shown by inscriptions of the emperor
Ch'ien-lung, dated 1746, written by himself and sealed with his seals.
The long roll of dark brown silk is painted in colours with eight scenes
to illustrate the " Admonitions " of Pan Chao, labelled with ap-
propriate extracts from her work, pencilled apparently in the
script of the period, although perhaps retouched with a later brush.
At the end of the roll is the signature Ku K'ai-chih. Three of the
eight scenes painted on the roll have been worthily reproduced in
the Burlington Magazine. The one which we are permitted
to present in Fig. 125 contains only a single figure to indicate the
delicacy and fine rhythm of the brush line characteristic of the
artist. It represents, according to the label attached, the lady
historian Pan Chao, clad in court costume with long flowing skirts,