Page 385 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

PICTORIAL ART. 129

as well as palace pavilions, portraits, and transformations of Maitreya
Buddha , the latter produced genre pictures of history and legend,
and views of contemporary life, his most famous pictures, painted
on white hempen paper, being representations of street scenes at the
capital with chariots and horses, processions of officials and citizens
in gala dress. The third, Sun Shang-tzu, less generally known,
painted pictures of graceful damsels, elves and sprites from the
woods and waters, Vimalakirti and other Buddhist saints. Yang
Ch'i-tan, the last of the four, painted the " New Year's Audience
at the Palace," an " Imperial Journey to Loyang," and many other
pictures of the kind. The naturalistic character of his work may
be inferred from a story that while painting the frescoes of a pagoda
one day, a fellow artist, asking to see the designs and sketches he
was working from, was taken presently to the palace and shown the
terraced pavilions, the brocaded robes and hats, the chariots and
horses, and told to his great astonishment : " These are my only
models."
The Buddhist monasteries had become at this time a great school
of art, inspired by the idealism of a new religion, so that their earlier
productions were works of faith rather than art. The pious artists
figured on silk a mystic dreamland through which their thoughts
wandered, peopled with divine spirits that had been revealed to no
ancestor of their own race. The Indian traditions were kept alive by
a stream of missionaries from the west, several of whose names
may be found in the Chinese lists of artists in the encyclopaedia.
It may suffice to mention Chi-ti-chii and Mo-lo-p'u-t'i (Mara Bodhi),
who came from India in the Liang dynasty (502-556) ; Ts'ao
Chung-ta, a celebrated painter of Buddhist figures, a native of
the Ts'ao country in Central Asia, near Samarkand ; Wei-ch'ih
Po-chih-na and his son Wei-ch'ih I-seng, the " Elder and Younger
Wei-ch'ih," scions of the royal house of Khotan in Eastern Turki-
stan ; the Indian Buddhist monk Dharma Kuksha, whose name is
transliterated in Chinese T'an-mo-cho-cha ; and his colleague