Spring Morning in the Han Palace – (Qiu Ying) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Qiu Ying

Museum: China Modern and Contemporary Art Document Research Center (Beijing, China)

Technique: Silk

This painting adopts a perspective slightly higher than buildings, putting the viewer’s sight up on the high and over the parapets. The garden scenery could be all included in the painting, so the viewer could have a panoramic view of the garden scenety.We could imagine that, as the audience slowly opened scroll, and his sight moved from the right to the left, from the outside to the inside of the garden. In the Ming Dynasty when there was an absence of moving images, it was quite a real palace travel. Paintings portraying court ladies’ activities have a time-honored history in Chinese classical painting. Qiu Ying, as the master of Wu men school, fully learned from the painting style of his former generations, and meanwhile blended contemporary aesthetic elements and details. The whole picture is divided by buildings, and ladies’ activities are carried out in and out of the buildings. Qiu Ying was adept at describing building structure and luxurious furnishings. The buildings he painted were not just perfunctory and simple structures, but are accurate architectural structures that are entirely reasonable and livable. Ladies’ dresses are modeling after those in Tang and Song Dynasties, but their bodies are more slender, delicate and thin, which is a typical image of feminine beauty recognized in Ming Dynasty.