Chinese Paintings

A young emperor sits armoured on a white horse and looks straight out of the picture, the review halted so the painting could get him exactly right. The Grand Review portrait shows the Qianlong emperor in the full regalia of a Manchu ruler inspecting his troops, a blend of Chinese court painting and the tighter

A landscape in silk, every mountain and cloud outlined by a technique that refuses to smudge, so that the picture reads as clearly as if it had been cut from the weave. Shen Zifan was the leading kesi master of the Southern Song, turning painted compositions into tapestries with a patience the age revered. Where

A silk picture built thread by thread so that even the smallest leaf has a clean edge, as if the painting had been grown rather than woven. Zhu Kerou was a woman artisan of the Song whose kesi, a silk tapestry that leaves no weave-direction blur, was prized by connoisseurs as equal to painting. The

After snow, a clear sky, and a note to a friend: Wang Xizhi says he is well and hopes the same of you. Twenty-eight characters carry the mood of a quiet afternoon seventeen centuries gone. The original is lost; what survives is a Tang-dynasty tracing that the Qianlong emperor treasured above almost everything else, inscribing

A short letter to a cousin who has gone away, written with the calm of someone who assumes the paper will outlast both of them. Wang Xun was a grandson of the great Wang family of the Eastern Jin, and his letter is the only surviving calligraphy from that circle that scholars trust as genuine.

A single running-script line breaks loose from its own grammar and keeps going, as if the brush decided the sentence was less interesting than the speed. The scroll is attributed to Wang Xianzhi, son of the sage Wang Xizhi, and it shows the family gift at full gallop: characters leaning into each other, a few

Nine lines of awkward, aching characters are all that survive of a letter written almost seventeen hundred years ago, and they are the oldest calligraphy in China attributed to a named hand. Lu Ji was a poet and prince who wrote the letter to a sick friend, promising to visit and asking after medicine. The

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,

Spring has not quite arrived, and Guo Xi paints the moment it decides to. Melting streams cut the valley floor while the peaks above still hold the cold, and a mist gathers where the season is still arguing with itself. Guo Xi served the Song court as both painter and theorist. His treatise, the ‘Lofty