Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Longing for serenity and harmony, Sung emperors liked to turn for contrast to closeups of nature, developed a keen liking for small and intimate scenes. I Yuan-chi's Monkey and Cats, almost playful in both subject matter and execution, is an outstanding example. Such paintings so won the admiration of the Emperor that he awarded I Yuan-chi the commission of decorating a courtyard at his palace on the Yellow River plain...
Whirlwind Hand. When the fierce Chin Tartars ("The Golden Tribes") swept down over the Great Wall, captured the capital Kaifeng and took Sung Emperor Huitsung, along with 3,000 of his court, into captivity in Mongolia, about 6,500 paintings in the imperial collection dating back over 1,000 years were destroyed or dispersed. But the Sung Dynasty held out in the south for another 150 years-long enough to make their new capital. Hangchow, with its willows and delicately arched bridges, one of the most beautiful cities of antiquity...
Believing with Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, that inspiration comes in a flash and cannot be long sustained, the Ch'an painter worked in monochrome "as if a whirlwind possessed his hand." Greatest of them all was Liang K'ai, who had won the Emperor's highest painting award, the Golden Girdle, before he retired to a Buddhist monastery. He dashed off such inspired sketches as his Ink Brushing of an Immortal, showing a monk tearing off his shirt to prove the indifference of the enlightened man to outward appearances...
...combine these earlier influences into a work that became uniquely his own. The drama is in the landscape itself, in the mountains and solid trees seen emerging through the fog. But 500 years later it was the small, indistinct figures that caught the eye of Ch'ing (Manchu) Emperor Ch'ien-lung, caused him to write his appreciation at the top of the scroll: "Mountain and villages, dimly seen through rain and clouds; the fisherman on his way home feels the weight [of rain] on his clothes...
Ground Rubies & Nutmegs. The national uprising that finally drove the Mongol troops north of the Great Wall and installed a young peasant on the throne as the first Ming Emperor in 1368 rapidly produced an epicurean age of elegance, not unlike that which marked the courts of Europe in the 18th century. The great pottery works of the Sung emperors were revived and expanded. For Emperor Hsuan-te's Dragon Soup Bowl, craftsmen ground rubies to powder to achieve richness of color; court ladies dipped their fingers into exquisite candy dishes for the cardamoms and nutmegs that served...