CHAPTER XIII 

 TOY DOGS IN CHINESE ART 



NO Chinese writer appears to have thought it worth 

 while to record the precise points of the pet dog of 

 his day. The most important evidence obtainable on 

 the exact characteristics of the ancestors of the " Pekingese " 

 breed has to be gleaned from such illustrations on paper, silk, 

 porcelain, or lacquer as are obtainable, and from the very 

 rare modelled or sculptured reproductions of true dogs. It 

 is, however, easy to over-estimate the importance of these 

 illustrations. As regards paintings on porcelain it must be 

 remembered that the pictorial work was carried out near the 

 potteries at Chin Te Chen in Kiangsi Province, 700 miles 

 south of Peking. It is unlikely that the pottery artists them- 

 selves ever saw the dogs they portrayed. They were working 

 from either verbal descriptions or pictures. In addition to 

 this there were difficulties of reproduction of colour and 

 form on porcelains usually made and painted by hand for 

 cheap wholesale consumption. 



Pictures upon silk or paper are commonly imitations of the 

 work of old masters, sometimes honest, but very frequently 

 made with fraudulent intentions. They have the charac- 

 teristic, remarkable to the European mind, of portraying in 

 a conventionally fixed manner. Modern Chinese painters are 

 so much slaves to style that a picture of some particular tree 

 or rock will often be nine-tenths the tree or rock of an old 

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