Page 399 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

PICTORIAL ART. 137

a small hunting bow with a quiver of arrows on his left arm, and a
pheasant hangs dowar behind beside the saddle-bag of leopard
skin.
The next picture, in Fig. 129, is a white falcon from the Anderson
collection, now in the British Museum, which is attributed in the
catalogue to tie emperor Hui Tsung of the Sung dynasty, but
bears no seal. It is drawn in a simple but masterly style-
The feathers are touched at their extremities with white
and stand out boldly from the dark brown ground of the
silk. This emperor, who reigned 1101-1125, signalised the first
year of his reign by establishing an imperial academy of calligraphy
and painting, the members of which were selected by open com-
petition. He was a great collector of antiquities and art objects,
but his collections were all dispersed in 1125, when the emperor
was carried off to Tartary and kept a prisoner there till his death
in 1135. A clever artist himself, he was famed for his pictures of
eagles, falcons, and other birds, on one of which a critic wrote :
" What joy to be limned by a divine hand ! " No collection of
any pretension in China is complete without a falcon drawn by
Hui Tsung, but they are not all genuine, even when caparisoned
with a full array of seals. The authenticity of the example before
us has been challenged, but the verdict may meanwhile be left
open, to be decided some day by a competent Chinese connoisseur.
The emperor Hui Tsung had a series of catalogues of his various
collections compiled by commissions of scholars and experts appoint-
ed for the pm-posc. The illustrated catalogues of his bronze and
jade antiquities were cited in Vol. I. as invaluable aids to the study
of archfeology. For the fine arts of calligraphy and painting we
have the Hsuan Ho Shu P'u, the " collection of Manuscripts in
the Hsiian Ho (Palace)," and the Hsiian Ho Hua P'u, the " Col-
lection of Paintings in the Hsiian Ho (Palace)." Hsiian Ho was
the name of one of the principal palaces in the imperial city of
K'ai-feng-fu in Honan, which was the capital of China at the time.