Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy
2 min readPainter: Yan Liben
Painting Year: the Tang Dynasty
Material: silk scroll
Dimension: vertical length of 38.5 centimeters
and horizontal length of 129.6 centimeters
Collection Place: the Palace Museun in Beijing
The Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy was one of the important figure paintings in the early Tang Dynasty. This artwork depicts the scene that Emperor-Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, who sat on a sedan chair, received Gar Songtsen,a Tibetan envoy that came to escort Princess Wencheng back to Tibet to finish the marriage. It truly refects the historical facts about the friendly communication between the Han people and the remote minorities in the Tang Dynasty.
The shapes of figures in the painting are clear and beautiful. The lines of these people’s clothes are drawn in a simple and solemn method. The facial features of these figures are exquisitely drawn with bright and steady colors. In the ancient fgure paintings, the sizes of figures were usually based on their social status. People with higher status were bigger in size in the painting while people with lower status had smaller sizes. Therefore, we can judge whether the people in the painting are noble or humble according totheir sizes in the picture. In this painting, the size of Emperor Taizong is the bigsest while the Tibetan envoy is drawn with a smaller size and the images of maids are the smallest. Moreover, the picture highlights people while ignoring the background, which is another feature of the fgure painting at that time.
Art Master
Yan Liben(circa 601-673)
He was an excellent painter in the early Tang Dynasty and came from Wannian, Yongzhou(today’s Xi’ an, Shaanxi). He once served the court as the Minister of Works and then was promoted to the Right Prime Minister. He was good at painting portraits and historical events. The topics of his pictures were usually portraits of emperors, nobles and offcials, as well as the historical events in the court.
