Page 388 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

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132 CHINESE ART.

Among the lesser luminaries of the T'ang dynasty were Wang
Wei and Han Kan. Wang Wei, who lived a.d. 699-759, a great
poet, was equally famous as a painter, and it was said of him that
" his poems were pictures, his pictures poems." He attained high
official rank as Minister of State, and is chiefly remembered as a
landscape painter, rivalling nature itself in idealist force and sug-
gestiveness. Some idea of his work may be gathered from this
landscape roll illustrated in Fig. 127, which is inscribed by the
artist as having been painted after the style of Wang Wei. Han
Kan, a protigf of Wang Wei, was also a portrait painter of a high
order, although his jorte was horses. When summoned to Court
the emperor assigned him a teacher, but he repHed : " The horses
in your Majesty's stables are my teachers." The picture in the
British Museum of a " Boy-Rishi riding on a Goat," illustrated in
Fig. 125, is considered to be an example of Han Kan's work, and is
described by Mr. L. Binyon :
" A pictorial vision of one of the Taoist genii in boyish form riding a
monstrous goat on the hills, a bird-cage slung on a plum-branch over his
shoulder, while goats and rams of a small terrestrial tribe gambol in dehght
around. Probably a genuine work of Han Kan. The art of the T'ang dyn-
asty, so far as we can ascertain, was marked not only by masculine vigour of
drawing, but by an interest in action and movement which seems to have
died out in later Chinese art, bequeathing its tradition to the great early
painters of Japan. Han Kan has been a congenial model for the Japanese ;
and the vivacity and power of draughtmanship shown, for instance, in these
gambolhng goats, inspired them with many a picture."
The distinction of Chinese painting into two great schools,
Northern and Southern, was generally recognised during the T'ang
dynasty. The northern school flourished in the valley of the
Yellow River and its great tributaries, the classical home of the
Chinese as an agricultural race with communistic sympathies
and the site of development of their peculiar cult. The southern
school was developed in the valley of the Yangtse River, especially
in its upper reaches, a picturesque land of hill and valley peopled
by men of kindred blood, who came later, however, into the Chinese