Chinese Paintings

A king suspected his minister of treason and sent a painter to the man’s parties to find out.

An emperor sits, an envoy stands, and an empire gets bigger.

Five oxen stand and do almost nothing, and that is the point.

Copying a masterpiece was how painters learned.

The greatest landscape of the Yuan dynasty was almost lost, then cut in half.

A city wakes up and goes to work.

On the bank of the Luo River, a prince meets a goddess he cannot keep.

An eighteen-year-old painted the most ambitious landscape in Chinese history and then vanished.

The most famous painting in China got copied for five hundred years.

A rice paddy and a silkworm tray, painted with the care usually reserved for emperors, because the Yongzheng emperor asked for exactly that. The Gengzhi tu is an old format, pictures of farming and weaving, here reworked in the Yongzheng court with the ruler himself sometimes inserted into the labourer’s place. It is propaganda with