Yi Yuanji

NORTHERN SONG DYNASTY C. 1000 – 1064 A.D. Yi Yuanji was a Northern Song Dynasty painter, famous for his realistic paintings of animals. According to Robert van Gulik, Yi Yuanji's paintings of gibbons were particularly celebrated. The 11th-century critic Guo Ruoxu (郭若虚) in his "Overview of Painting" (图画见闻志, Tuhua Jian Wen Zhi) tells this about Yi's career: ... His painting was excellent: flowers and birds, bees and cicadas he rendered life-like with subtle detail. At first he specialized in flower and fruit, but after he had seen such paintings by Zhao Chang (趙昌), he admitted their superiority with a sigh, and then resolved he would acquire fame by painting subjects not yet tried by the artists of old; thus he began to paint roebucks and gibbons. He spent months roaming the mountains of southern Hubei and northern Hunan, watching roebucks (獐鹿) and gibbons (猿狖) in their natural environment. In this painting Yi paints a Qilin, a mythical hooved chimerical creature, seated with a raised left foreleg at the base of a hill covered in foliage. Pigments painted on silk, signed with three characters (易元吉) and a chop 12.25 x 6.5 in. (31 x 16.5 cm.) PRICE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST