Two men sit on a mountainside and refuse to eat. They are the lords of Boyi and Shuqi, who starved rather than serve a new dynasty, and Li Tang paints the hunger as a kind of dignity.
Li Tang was the bridge between Northern and Southern Song painting. When the court fled south after 1127, he carried the monumentality of the north into a tighter, more anxious age. The boulders here are heavy, the brush is iron, and the isolation is political as much as physical.
The subject was a coded loyalty: a painter of the exiled Song telling his rulers that fidelity to a lost order is its own form of survival. It is one of the sharpest political pictures the Southern Song produced.
Object details
| Name | Picking Ferns (采薇图) |
|---|---|
| Artefact no. | — |
| Technique | Ink and colour on silk |
| Period | Southern Song dynasty (12th century) |
| Collection | The Palace Museum, Beijing |
| Source | 北京故宫博物院 |
Image © The Palace Museum, Beijing. See the original in the museum collection.