ITP 60: The Emperor Rebuffs ‘The Beautiful Wife Who Knew Herself to Be Beautiful’ attributed to Gu Kaizhi, from Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies
In ten days time the British Museum will host an international academic conference devoted to one of the most remarkable objects in its collection: The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies, which is the earliest known masterpiece of Chinese painting. Next Saturday, to coincide with that event, this rarely seen and exceptionally fragile painting will be placed on public display for the first time for many years. For reasons of conservation it will remain on view for only three weeks, before returning once again to the darkness of the museum stores.
Painted in ink on silk, the Admonitions scroll is the only surviving work of art attributed to the most celebrated master of the Period of Disunity, Gu Kaizhi (circa AD 345-406). In the words of Jane Portal, curator of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, the scroll “is generally regarded as the single most important Chinese painting in the world”. Eleven feet long and nine inches wide (a detail can only be shown here) the work offers a series of exquisite, tantalising glimpses of the great lost tradition of early Chinese painting – a tradition of which it is the sole remaining relic.
For more than a thousand years, Gu Kaizhi’s work has been viewed by connoisseurs and collectors of Asian art with an admiration bordering on awe. At the end of the roll of silk on which it was painted are attached a multitude of colophons, or notes of appreciation, written (as was long customary in China) by appreciative past owners. These include an extravagant eulogy written in 1746 by the hand of Ch’ien Lung, the famous Emperor, describing it as one of his greatest treasures. Among many other collectors’ seals printed on the roll are those of Sung Ch’I, eleventh century statesman, and Hui Tsung, artist-Emperor of the twelfth.
The scroll’s disappearance from the imperial palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing, at the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, and its subsequent acquisition by the British Museum, continue to be regarded by the Chinese authorities as little short of a cultural tragedy. The Admonitions scroll is their Elgin Marbles: not only the summit of Chinese painting in the classical period, but also the fons et origo of all pictorial art to come afterwards. The irony is that partly because of the extreme rarity of its public appearances, and partly because of a general lack of familiarity with Chinese art in this country, very few British citizens are even aware that this great treasure is part of the national art collections.
Arranged in the form of a didactic narrative, unfolding in successive vignettes, the painting addresses the themes of power, beauty and virtue in the early Chinese imperial court. One of its nine scenes is reproduced on this page: The Emperor Rebuffs ‘The Beautiful Wife Who Knew Herself to Be Beautiful’. A flirtatious concubine, all aflutter with the consciousness of her own charms, is sternly rebuked for her vanity by her imperial master. Gu Kaizhi’s image is a small wonder of observation, compression, and technical mastery. The figure of the emperor embodies moral revulsion. Raising an eloquent, nervily reproving hand and casting a glance of cool but withering contempt in the direction of the lady who has so displeased him, he is on the point of turning away in disgust. The fragile expression that she wears on her porcelain face suggests the beginnings of a sullen pout.
The relationship between the two figures is perfectly expressed in the contrast between them. The emperor is compact, statuesque, rigorously composed, whereas the concubine is a fluid and volatile creature. His robes are looped about him in solid, almost sculptural folds, while the elaborate court dress which she wears falls about her feet in a spreading pool of silk. The red scarf tied around her neck floats away at her back, forming a flame-like arabesque intended perhaps to signal her barely contained emotions.
Gu Kaizhi regarded eloquent abbreviation as the soul of art. “Painting a pretty girl,” he is recorded to have said, “is like carving in silver. It is no use trying to get a likeness by elaboration; one must trust to a touch here and a stroke there to suggest the essence of her beauty.” There was also a close relationship, in Chinese classical civilisation, between calligraphy and painting – writing in China, accomplished with brush rather than pen, being itself a form of picture-making – and Gu Kaizhi’s figures seem to reflect this. Almost like Chinese calligraphic characters, they are diagrams of a kind. It as if two archetypal human emotions, or states of being, should have been distilled to some absolute essence of linear description.
The different scenes of the scroll are framed by columns of script drawn from the artist’s literary source, a moralising text written in AD 292 by the statesman and poet Zhang Hua in order to satirise the shrewish third-century Empress Zia. In that work, the author adopted the persona of a court instructress or moral tutor, vainly attempting to instil proper Confucian values into a ruthless empress and her court.
Within the Confucian code it was, for example, thought inappropiate that a ruler should become absorbed by romantic passion for any single individual. The lines accompanying The Emperor Rebuffs ‘The Beautiful Wife Who Knew Herself to Be Beautiful’ advise each concubine to recognise that she can only be one of many, in the emperor’s affections – a moral which may also have been directed to over-eager courtiers resorting to flattery to advance their careers. The passage has been translated as follows:
Favour must not be abused, and love must not be exclusive.
Exclusive love breeds coyness and extreme passion is fickle.
All that has waxed must also wane, and this principle is sure.
Admire your own beauty if you will, but that brings misfortune.
Seeking to please with a seductive face, you will be despised by honourable men;
If the bond of love is severed, this is the cause.
Thus it is said:
Prosperity is fostered with caution; honour will attend those who reflect.
Gu Kaizhi appears to have taken a lighthearted and perhaps even somewhat irreverent attitude to the severe ethical tract that was his source. According to Shane McCausland of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art at London University, “The painter’s interest in human encounter and station is almost scornful of a desire to instruct in moral learning… Such pictures play mockingly with the old-fashioned values embedded in them. They announce the beginning of self-conscious artistic expression in China.” This seems particularly true of the encounter between stern emperor and truculent concubine shown here. She looks sulky rather than penitent, and more than likely to have another go at getting her way; and although he is plainly fed up with her, he also seems slightly intimidated by her mood. They are more like characters in a comedy than a morality play.
The formidable scholar and poet Laurence Binyon acquired the Admonitions scroll for the nation from a decommissioned British soldier named Johnson in 1903 (how it came to be in said soldier’s kitbag remains a mystery). Binyon too was impressed by the humour and playfulness of the work, suspecting that behind it lay “the presence of a sensitive, modern, Epicurean, perhaps rather decadent artist.”
Gu Kaizhi was known in his own time as “the greatest wit, the greatest painter, and the greatest fool of his day”. He was noted for his manner of eating sugar cane, beginning at the wrong end and (in his words) “entering gradually into paradise”; as well as for his fondness for coining aphorisms. In a typically sly and elegant put-down of professional musicians, whose skills he thought were overrated compared to those of the painter, he famously remarked that “It is easier to strike the five-stringed lute than to note the flight of a wild swan.” His conversation was evidently as spare and economical as his art.
Date: 10-06-2001
Owning Institution: British Museum.
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
Middle Ages & Earlier
In ten days time the British Museum will host an international academic conference devoted to one of the most remarkable objects in its collection: The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies, which is the earliest known masterpiece of Chinese painting. Next Saturday, to coincide with that event, this rarely seen and exceptionally fragile painting will be placed on public display for the first time for many years. For reasons of conservation it will remain on view for only three weeks, before returning once again to the darkness of the museum stores. Painted in ink on silk, the Admonitions scroll is the only surviving work of art attributed to the most celebrated master of the Period of Disunity, Gu Kaizhi (circa AD 345-406). In the words of Jane Portal, curator of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, the scroll “is generally regarded as the single most important Chinese painting in the world”. Eleven feet long and nine inches wide (a detail can only be shown here) the work offers a series of exquisite, tantalising glimpses of the great lost tradition of early Chinese painting – a tradition of which it is the sole remaining relic.
For more than a thousand years, Gu Kaizhi’s work has been viewed by connoisseurs and collectors of Asian art with an admiration bordering on awe. At the end of the roll of silk on which it was painted are attached a multitude of colophons, or notes of appreciation, written (as was long customary in China) by appreciative past owners. These include an extravagant eulogy written in 1746 by the hand of Ch’ien Lung, the famous Emperor, describing it as one of his greatest treasures. Among many other collectors’ seals printed on the roll are those of Sung Ch’I, eleventh century statesman, and Hui Tsung, artist-Emperor of the twelfth.
The scroll’s disappearance from the imperial palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing, at the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, and its subsequent acquisition by the British Museum, continue to be regarded by the Chinese authorities as little short of a cultural tragedy. The Admonitions scroll is their Elgin Marbles: not only the summit of Chinese painting in the classical period, but also the fons et origo of all pictorial art to come afterwards. The irony is that partly because of the extreme rarity of its public appearances, and partly because of a general lack of familiarity with Chinese art in this country, very few British citizens are even aware that this great treasure is part of the national art collections.
Arranged in the form of a didactic narrative, unfolding in successive vignettes, the painting addresses the themes of power, beauty and virtue in the early Chinese imperial court. One of its nine scenes is reproduced on this page: The Emperor Rebuffs ‘The Beautiful Wife Who Knew Herself to Be Beautiful’. A flirtatious concubine, all aflutter with the consciousness of her own charms, is sternly rebuked for her vanity by her imperial master. Gu Kaizhi’s image is a small wonder of observation, compression, and technical mastery. The figure of the emperor embodies moral revulsion. Raising an eloquent, nervily reproving hand and casting a glance of cool but withering contempt in the direction of the lady who has so displeased him, he is on the point of turning away in disgust. The fragile expression that she wears on her porcelain face suggests the beginnings of a sullen pout.
The relationship between the two figures is perfectly expressed in the contrast between them. The emperor is compact, statuesque, rigorously composed, whereas the concubine is a fluid and volatile creature. His robes are looped about him in solid, almost sculptural folds, while the elaborate court dress which she wears falls about her feet in a spreading pool of silk. The red scarf tied around her neck floats away at her back, forming a flame-like arabesque intended perhaps to signal her barely contained emotions.
Gu Kaizhi regarded eloquent abbreviation as the soul of art. “Painting a pretty girl,” he is recorded to have said, “is like carving in silver. It is no use trying to get a likeness by elaboration; one must trust to a touch here and a stroke there to suggest the essence of her beauty.” There was also a close relationship, in Chinese classical civilisation, between calligraphy and painting – writing in China, accomplished with brush rather than pen, being itself a form of picture-making – and Gu Kaizhi’s figures seem to reflect this. Almost like Chinese calligraphic characters, they are diagrams of a kind. It as if two archetypal human emotions, or states of being, should have been distilled to some absolute essence of linear description.
The different scenes of the scroll are framed by columns of script drawn from the artist’s literary source, a moralising text written in AD 292 by the statesman and poet Zhang Hua in order to satirise the shrewish third-century Empress Zia. In that work, the author adopted the persona of a court instructress or moral tutor, vainly attempting to instil proper Confucian values into a ruthless empress and her court.
Within the Confucian code it was, for example, thought inappropiate that a ruler should become absorbed by romantic passion for any single individual. The lines accompanying The Emperor Rebuffs ‘The Beautiful Wife Who Knew Herself to Be Beautiful’ advise each concubine to recognise that she can only be one of many, in the emperor’s affections – a moral which may also have been directed to over-eager courtiers resorting to flattery to advance their careers. The passage has been translated as follows:
Favour must not be abused, and love must not be exclusive.
Exclusive love breeds coyness and extreme passion is fickle.
All that has waxed must also wane, and this principle is sure.
Admire your own beauty if you will, but that brings misfortune.
Seeking to please with a seductive face, you will be despised by honourable men;
If the bond of love is severed, this is the cause.
Thus it is said:
Prosperity is fostered with caution; honour will attend those who reflect.
Gu Kaizhi appears to have taken a lighthearted and perhaps even somewhat irreverent attitude to the severe ethical tract that was his source. According to Shane McCausland of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art at London University, “The painter’s interest in human encounter and station is almost scornful of a desire to instruct in moral learning… Such pictures play mockingly with the old-fashioned values embedded in them. They announce the beginning of self-conscious artistic expression in China.” This seems particularly true of the encounter between stern emperor and truculent concubine shown here. She looks sulky rather than penitent, and more than likely to have another go at getting her way; and although he is plainly fed up with her, he also seems slightly intimidated by her mood. They are more like characters in a comedy than a morality play.
The formidable scholar and poet Laurence Binyon acquired the Admonitions scroll for the nation from a decommissioned British soldier named Johnson in 1903 (how it came to be in said soldier’s kitbag remains a mystery). Binyon too was impressed by the humour and playfulness of the work, suspecting that behind it lay “the presence of a sensitive, modern, Epicurean, perhaps rather decadent artist.”
Gu Kaizhi was known in his own time as “the greatest wit, the greatest painter, and the greatest fool of his day”. He was noted for his manner of eating sugar cane, beginning at the wrong end and (in his words) “entering gradually into paradise”; as well as for his fondness for coining aphorisms. In a typically sly and elegant put-down of professional musicians, whose skills he thought were overrated compared to those of the painter, he famously remarked that “It is easier to strike the five-stringed lute than to note the flight of a wild swan.” His conversation was evidently as spare and economical as his art.
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