Chinese art / [Stephen Wooton Bushell].

  • Stephen Wootton Bushell
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Chinese art / [Stephen Wooton Bushell]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    47/338 page 35
    “ Drawing our polished bows of horn, And fitting arrows to the strings, We drove them over the hills ; The hoofs of the chase resounded, And they herded in close-packed mass. As the drivers checked their horses. “ The hinds and stags pressed swiftly on. Till they reached the great hunting park. We drove on through the forest, And as we found them one by one, We shot with our arrows the wild boar and elk.” Passing on next to the mural decoration of buildings and tombs by sculptured figures, we find many references to such in early litera- ture. The life of Confucius describes a visit of the sage in B.c. 517 to the court of the Chou at Loyang, and how he saw on the Walls of the Hall of Light, where the feudal princes were received in audience, portraits of Yao and Shun, figures of the last tyrants of the lines of Hsia and Shang, with words of praise or blame affixed to each, and a picture of Chou Rung in attendance as minister upon his infant nephew Ch’eng Wang (see Fig. 5) :— “ Now,” exclaimed Confucius, I know the wisdom of the Duke of Chou and understand how his house attained to imperial sway; we see antiquity as in a glass and can apply its lessons to the present day.” Other writers from the 2nd century b.c. onwards speak of ancestral temples and tombs of princes and high officials, in the provinces of Ssuchuan, Hupei, and Shantung, containing intaglio carvings-and sculptured bas-reliefs,, representing all kinds of scenes, terrestrial and celestial, historical and mythological. The best known examples that have come down to us are derived from two localities in the province of Shantung, and are attributed to the ist century b.c. and to the 2nd century a.d. respectively. Rubbings are prepared from the stones in the way that has been described and circulated throughout China, for the use of scholars, in a collection numbering about eighty sheets, and they have been published, as a whole or in part, in several
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3