tour 13 of 14
Mountains and water: Chinese landscape painting
Admonitions scroll
The Admonitions handscroll is an important work
in the history of Chinese art. The painting is one of the earliest
on silk in China and is probably a sixth-century AD copy of an
original painting by Gu Kaizhi (about AD 344-406). It illustrates
episodes from an eighty-line poem entitled 'The Admonitions
of the Instructress to the Court Ladies', written as a code
of ethics for the women of the imperial
court.
Gu was a leading
figure painter in early China especially renowned for his ability
to show expressions and feelings in his paintings. The scene
illustrated here, known as 'The mountain and the
hunter', is the only landscape scene in the scroll. The
mountains represent a great person, and the hunter, about to kill
an animal, represents how quickly greatness can be lost. Early
landscape painting was very simplified. The basic shape of the
mountain is a triangle and the hunter, animals and birds are
painted on a larger scale than the mountain because they are more
important.
The painting is
also important because of the people who collected it. It was
recorded in the collection of Emperor Huizong of the Northern Song
Dynasty in the twelfth century AD and has an inscription by Emperor
Zhangzong of the Jin Dynasty (ruled 1189-1208). During the Yuan and
Ming Dynasties it passed into private hands until in the Qing
Dynasty it entered the collection of the Emperor Qianlong
(1736-95).