Five Tribute Horses with Grooms
3 min readPainter: Li Gonglin
Painting Year: the Northern Song Dynasty
Material: silk scroll
Dimension: vertical length of 29.3 centimeters and horizontal length of 225 centimeters collection Place: privately collected by Japanese
Five Tribute Horses with Grooms is representative artwork of Li Gonglin,a famous painter in the Northern Song Dynasty. It portrays fve horses as tributes of the kingdoms in the Western Regions for the Northern Song Dynasty.A groom guides a horse. Beside which, horse name, birth place, age and body length of every horse are inscribed by Huang Tingjian,a famous calligrapher in the Northern Song Dynasty.
This artwork fully proves the painter’s super artistic accomplishments. Five famous horses quietly wait for being portrayed by the painter, which keep still or slowly walk. They radiate strength from static posture. Five grooms take appreciative and proud appearance, from which people can probe into their differences in terms of ethnic group, identity and temperature. These horses and grooms adopt line drawingmethod with slight rendering of ink. Some locals are applied with light colors. The lines are thin, and ink color is elegant.
Art Master
Li Gonglin(1049-1106)
Li Gonglin was a famous painter in the Northern Song Dynasty, who was a native of Shucheng, Luzhou(today’s Tongcheng, Anhui). He was good at painting fgures and saddled horses. He developed line drawing method into independent painting form, which has far-reaching inpact on following generations.
Story Corner
Li Gonglin painted horses
In the Northern Song Dynasty, Yuzhen Kingdom (ancient kingdom located in today’s Hetian, Xinjian)presented fve horses as tributes to imperial court. in the Western Regions Li Gonglin was excited to see strong and vigorous horses. So he decided to portray them. In the process of careful observation and research, Li Gonglin painted many times and portrayed with increasing resemblance. Grooms felt anxious for this. They superstitiously believed that”god”would take these horses which looked like the real ones. So they asked Li Gonglin not to portray fve horses. By coincidence, after Li Gonglin fnished portray for the last”Man Chuan Hua”, this famous horse died. At that time, Huang Tingjian recorded this thing in his inscription on the Five Tribute Horses with Grooms, and commented horse soul was taken under the brush of Li Gonglin.
This horse”Hao Tou chi”is not as fat as the horse painted by the painter of the Tang Dynasty.This artwork ot as fat as the hors painted by the painter of the Tang Dyasty；This artwork aphasizes the strength of Do You Know？
Paintings of the Song Dynasty
Paintings of the Song Dynasty marked the golden era of highly prosperous Chinese painting art.Court painting ushered in great development，and scholar painting began to mature.Various painting topics and techniques en joyed unprecedented development.Painting of figure，painting of landscape and painting of flower and bird promoted each other.
This horse”Feng Tou Cong’is stout and strong，and the spots on the body are shining.It features snooth line and vigorous postures.The clothing texture of groom is also refned.
Brief Background
Line drawing
Line drawing refers to a technique of the traditional Chinese painting，which demands adoption of ink lines to outline the objects，and emphasizes brushwork change and intensity of lines without rendering of colors.
This horse”Man Chuan hua”features snooth line，accurate body structure and vivid posture.The groom is also vividly depicted.
