Page:Frank Owen - The Scarlett Hill, 1941.djvu/143

RV 138 (LADY T'AI CHÊN) meats. His ending was melancholy. He became so fat, he died. Ming Huang commanded that he be buried in an Imperial coffin. The pall-bearers must have been giants.

Once the Emperor sent Kao Li-shih to buy certain horses that were being auctioned at a fair. As Kao knew little about horses, the results were far from satisfactory. A sadder lot of horses had never come into the stables.

"You must have picked them," declared Ming Huang, "by gazing at the portraits of others."

So fond of horses was Ming Huang that he kept a Court painter to make studies of them exclusively. His name was Han Kan and though he was a master of portraiture, it is for his horses that he will forever be remembered. His first job had been as pot-boy at an inn patronized by Wang Wei whose interest had been aroused when he beheld him drawing pictures of horses and men in the dust of the inn yard. He supplied the boy with sufficient money so that he could devote all his time to study. Later, Wang Wei presented him to the Emperor who found a place for him in the household.

Han Kan studied assiduously in the palace stables, constantly making sketches of horses. So carefully done were they, they were really portraits. In these paintings, nothing was permitted to detract from the horse as the center of interest. Human characters were secondary. One of his most famous masterpieces was of a hundred horses, no two alike, painted so superbly that one could almost see the bones beneath the skin. RV 138 (138)