Author:

Category：Ink Painting

Size:Length:135 x Width:69 (cm)

Size description：222x87x6.1(含框)

Introduction：Ho Chang-cheng: biographical details unknown.

Since antiquity, the horse has carried multiple layers of symbolic meaning in China, and has been one of the subjects most beloved by painters throughout the ages. The Tang dynasty master Han Gan excelled at painting the magnificent horses of the imperial stable, and placed great importance on painting from life. His works "Pastured Horses" and "Zhao Ye Bai" are executed with consummate skill, and the "Record of Famous Painters of the Tang Dynasty" placed them in the category of "divine works," praising them with the words "open the door and they will walk out, pull them from the wall and they will fly." The Song dynasty's Li Kung-lin also excelled in saddle-horse painting; his "Five Horses" depicts five fine horses presented as tribute from the Western Regions together with their grooms, rendered in the baimiao (plain line) technique with precise recording of the horses' physique, demeanor, and expression. The Yuan dynasty's Zhao Mengfu depicted men and horses from multiple angles in "Man and Horse," "Man on Horseback," and "Bathing Horses," among other works, not only displaying the painter's deep skill in brushwork and line but also lending the relationship of person and horse the allegorical resonance of a sagely judge of horses. In the Qing dynasty, the foremost painter of horses was the Italian Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione, who employed Western techniques of light and shadow and perspective combined with gongbi brushwork to record the remarkable and extraordinary horses housed in the palace from the Kangxi to the Qianlong reigns; his celebrated surviving works include "One Hundred Horses."

From the Republican era onward, the manner of depicting horses underwent a great transformation; painters seldom followed the precise manner of earlier court academic painting, and freehand brushwork depictions of galloping horses became widely favored. The most celebrated painter of horses in this period is undoubtedly Xu Beihong. Trained in the realistic tradition of Japan and the West, Xu Beihong placed great importance on painting animals from life; his forms gradually moved from complexity to simplicity, producing works such as "Galloping Horses" with their fluid brevity and bold, unrestrained spirit. Ho Chang-cheng's galloping horse technique is modeled on Xu Beihong's manner, though somewhat less fluent in execution, yet it faithfully conveys the spirit of unceasing striving and indomitable forward momentum.

Accession Number:PT06906800

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