THE PRINT ROOM OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
The Department has acquired by purchase an extremely interesting and important addition to the collection of Chinese paintings. This is a long roll, containing scenes of court life and amusements in the first century A.D. Pan Chao, a female historian of that era, is among the figures represented. It is painted in colours on brown silk; green, purple, and a tawny yellow have been used, but have more or less sunk, so that the general impression is that of a painting in vermilion and black, the two pigments which have stood best. The actual workmanship, especially the modulation of the brush-line, is of extraordinary beauty and power, and can only be that of a great master. There seems no reason to doubt that we have in this roll an authentic work by Ku K‘ai-chih (‘Ko-gai-shi’ in Japanese pronunciation), a very famous artist of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., to whom it has always been attributed, though the signature and inscriptions are probably of later date. Annexed to the roll is a eulogy of the painter in the handwriting of Ch‘ien Lung, the emperor who received Lord Macartney’s embassy in 1793; and following this is an admirable and delicate ink-landscape by an eighteenth-century painter. The importance of a picture by Ku K‘ai-chih will be realized when we consider that of the art of the T‘ang dynasty (600 to 900 A.D.) hardly a vestige remains, while relics of the later Sung period are extremely rare. Nothing so ancient exists in Japan, the country where for a thousand years the early paintings of China have been collected with ardour and preserved with veneration. ¶ A full account of this and some other important examples of Chinese painting will shortly be given in this magazine.
L. B.