Feb., 1912. Jade. 345 



er nicety of the composition is the posture of the elephant taken from 

 the front which allowed the artist to centre it correctly, and to elevate 

 its back so high that the sweeper rises into prominent view. Yen Li- 

 pen surely was an artist who knew what he wanted, and who could carry 

 his intentions into effect. Painted in colors, his work must have created 

 a lasting impression. The elephant is certainly animated by "life's 

 motion;" his head is finely modeled, his drooping ears, trunk and tusks 

 are true to nature, and he seems to enjoy the ticklish sensations from 

 his shampoo. The attempt to mark the folds in the skin of the pachy- 

 derm is no less remarkable, and the painter seems to have made earnest 

 studies of the animal from life. Altogether, this picture presents an 

 intimate genre-scene of Buddhist art, an offshoot of the epoch of the 

 T'ang, such as no other of this class has survived, and the Sung Cata- 

 logue of Jades deserves our thanks for its preservation. 



In modern wood-engraving, this motive has been frequently copied. 1 

 We alluded to the cut in the Fang-shih mo p'u (Ch. 5, p. 21 b) which is a 

 poor makeshift, and Prof. Giles (/. c.) was quite right in the remark that 

 it is not easy to gather from this woodcut that the painter was a great 

 artist in our sense of the term. It is here reproduced in Fig. 202 for no 

 other reason than to afford an instructive comparison between a good 

 and a dead copy of an ancient painting. It is not stated from which 

 source this copy is taken ; the legend in the upper right corner refers it 

 to T'ang Yen Li-pen. The elephant has turned here into an automatic 

 machine, and all figures bear a stiff wooden character; all spirituality 

 is lost. Note the emaciated arm and leg and the horrible hand of the 

 boy shouldering a box (supposed to contain sacred books), the exag- 

 gerated flames of the jewel, the insipid change in the costumes, head- 

 dresses and faces of the two laymen, the wrong attitude of the man 

 pouring the water, and the caricature of the sweeper who is standing 

 on the animal's back, instead of kneeling, and touching with the end 

 of his broom a cloud on which a book-case is hovering, — an additional 

 flatness. Luckily, the bad quality of this picture is exceptional in 



1 In a modern wood-engraving printed in Nanking and representing a sermon of 

 Buddha before the assembly of monks, Mafijucrt is riding on the lion's back in the 

 foreground, and to his left an elephant is being vehemently scrubbed. Hokusai 

 has in his Mangwa (Vol. 13, p. 20) the sketch of an elephant washed by six men. 

 The believers in the superiority of Japanese over Chinese art should not fail to look 

 up this freakish caricature, and to compare it with Yen's natural creation. Hoku- 

 sai 's elephant is provided with bear-claws! The objection that he had had no 

 chance to see a live specimen is not valid; he had occasion enough to observe good 

 models in Buddhist art. And see at the same time on p. 23 the combination of a 

 camel with a cocoanut-tree! Nobody would think that this creature with sharp 

 eagle-claws should represent a camel, if the name were not printed beside it. And 

 then there was a time when a shallow mind like Hokusai could be considered in 

 Europe as a revelation of East-Asiatic art. 



