24 THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART 



share in a celebrated picture representing foreign national types, painted 

 conjointly with his brother. He painted very numerous portraits and 

 scenes of life in scrolls and as wall pictures preserved in temples. Besides 

 tlie lessons received from his father Li-p6n looked upon Chong Fa-shi, the 

 imitator of Chang Song-yu, as his instructor, but he far surpassed him. The 

 Emperor Hui-tsung's Gallery contained 42 of his pictures, including 

 several representations of foreign life and a number of portraits, whereas 

 Li-to is represented by nine titles only, one of which reads "Wang Hi-chi 

 (the great calligraphist) pointing his brush." Yen Li-p6n 's ethnographical 

 picture, the Si-yii-t'u ("Types from Eastern Turkestan") is said to have 

 been later on indorsed with an autogram by the celebrated painter of the 

 Mongol period Chau M6ng-fu (died 1322), who comments on the beauties of 

 the work and the diflSculties of the subject. Friedrich Hirih} 



KUO HSI. Sung Dynasty. 



The name of Kuo Hsi, known to the Japanese as Kwakki, stands among 

 the greatest of Chinese painters. Unfortimately , we are not told very much 

 about him. Anderson says he "flourished in the period Kai (K'ai) Pao 

 (968-976)" — a century before his time. We read that "he was admitted 

 into the Imperial Picture Gallery as a student, and that by his landscapes 

 and gloomy forests he soon made a name for himself. At first he relied on 

 cleverness of touch, but gradually he began to put more work into his pic- 

 tures and to adopt the method of Li Ch'eng. His compositions were very 

 much improved thereby; and then, later on, he came to seek inspiration and 

 ideas from himself, giving free play to his hand on the walls of lofty halls. 

 For tall pines, huge trees, swirling streams, beetling crags, steep precipices, 

 mountain peaks, now lovely in the rising mist, now lost in an obscuring pall, 

 with all their thousand and ten thousand shapes — critics allow that he strode 

 alone across his generation, and that old age only added extra vigour to his 

 brush." 



As regards dates, we are told that in 1068 he received the Imperial com- 

 mand to paint, in collaboration with two contemporary artists, a screen in 

 three panels, the middle one being allotted to him. He published a treatise 

 entitled "On Landscape-painting," in which "he discusses distance, depth, 

 wind and rain, light and darkness; also the differences of nights and mornings 

 at the four seasons of the year; how in a painting the spring hills should melt 

 as it were into a smile, how the summer hills should be as it were a blend of 

 blue and green, how the autumn hills should be clear and pure as a honey 

 cake (?), and how the winter hills should appear as though asleep. " There 

 is another passage in which he speaks of "a great mountain grandly domi- 

 nating the lesser hills, and a tall pine offering a splendid example to other 

 trees" — but here, says a critic, he is no longer on ground consecrated to 

 painting alone. 



' Scraps from a Collector's Note Book, being notes on some Chinese Painters of the present 

 dynasty with appendices on some old masters and art historians. By Friedrich Hirth, Pro- 

 fessor of Chinese, Columbia University in the city of New York. Leiden. Oriental Printing 

 Office, 1903. 



