Xuānhé huàpǔ 宣和畫譜
Painting Catalogue of the Xuānhé Era anonymous compilation (apparently by 米芾 and others), commissioned by 趙佶 (Sòng Huīzōng), 宋 xuānyìng 宣御
About the work
The official catalogue of the imperial painting collection of the Northern Sòng compiled in Xuānhé 2 (gēngzǐ, 1120). The catalogue records 6,396 paintings by 231 painters from Wú Dàozǐ down to the Xuānhé present, arranged into ten genre-categories: (1) Dàoshì 道釋 (Daoist and Buddhist), (2) Rénwù 人物 (figures), (3) Gōngshì 宮室 (architecture), (4) Fānzú 蕃族 (foreign peoples), (5) Lóngyú 龍魚 (dragons and fish), (6) Shānshuǐ 山水 (landscape), (7) Niǎoshòu 鳥獸 (birds and beasts), (8) Huāmù 花木 (flowers and trees), (9) Mòzhú 墨竹 (ink bamboo), (10) Shūguǒ 蔬果 (vegetables and fruit). A preface signed “Sòng Huīzōng” precedes the work, but its language (“at present the Son of Heaven, etc.”) is conventional ministerial encomium and the Sìkù editors regarded the imperial attribution as fictive. The catalogue is the principal source for what was in the Sòng imperial collection at its absolute peak, just before the catastrophe of 1126–27.
Tiyao
We have respectfully examined: Xuānhé huàpǔ in twenty juàn, no compiler named. It records the paintings held in the inner palace under Huīzōng. The book has a preface dated Xuānhé gēngzǐ (1120), titled “imperially composed” — but the language is the convention of ministerial encomium, and we suspect the titular attribution to be in error. The recorded works total 231 persons and 6,396 scrolls, distributed in ten categories: Dàoshì; Rénwù; Gōngshì; Fānzú; Lóngyú; Shānshuǐ; Niǎoshòu; Huāmù; Mòzhú; Shūguǒ. Examine Zhào Yánwèi’s Yúnlù mànchāo on the Xuānhé Painting Academy: it divides into six disciplines: (1) Buddhist and Daoist, (2) figures, (3) landscape, (4) birds and beasts, (5) bamboo and flowers, (6) architecture — broadly similar to this with small differences. Apparently the categories were re-set later. Cài Tāo’s Tiěwéishān cóngtán says: “At the start of Chóngnínɡ 崇寧, Sòng Qiáonián was put in charge of the imperial calligraphy-and-painting office. Qiáonián was later dismissed, then Mǐ Fú and others took over. By the late years, what the imperial collection held came to the thousands. I in Xuānhé guǐmǎo (1123) had occasion to see the catalogue.” Guǐmǎo is three years after gēngzǐ; so the catalogue mentioned must in fact be the basis on which both the calligraphy and painting pǔ of that time were arranged. Huīzōng’s painting was personally skilled; Mǐ Fú is known to have been a refined connoisseur — what is recorded here, drawn from collectors, has genuine evidential weight, unlike the constant errors of Wáng Fǔ’s Bógǔ tú. Cài Tāo also notes that of the painters preserved in the imperial collection the highest is Cáo Bùxīng’s Yuánnǚ shòu Huángdì bīngfú tú, second Cáo Máo’s Biàn Zhuāngzǐ cìhǔ tú, third Xiè Zhì’s Liènǚ zhēnjié tú; only from there does the order count Gù [Kǎizhī], Lù [Tànwēi], and Sēngyáo on down. The present text orders them otherwise — apparently the catalogue groups by category, but the collection-list within each category was by date — and the Biàn Zhuāngzǐ cìhǔ tú is here attributed to Wèi Xié, not to Cáo Máo, so attributions too have been corrected and changed. Wáng Kěntáng’s Bǐzhǔ says: “The Huàpǔ gathers up notes from several houses or compositions by subordinates, not from a single hand — hence the internal contradictions: e.g., the landscape section calls Wáng Shìyuán a master of all schools, while the Gōngshì section treats him as a low artisan; the Xǔ Dàoníng entry calls Zhāng Wényì greatly praising him — these are not Huīzōng’s own pen. He clearly never combed through the preface.” But the points of contradiction he identifies are real losses. Respectfully collated, Qiánlóng 46 (1781), sixth month.
Abstract
The Xuānhé huàpǔ (with its sister-work the KR3h0026 Xuānhé shūpǔ) is the foundational document for the history of the Sòng imperial collections and the single most-cited Sòng catalogue in later connoisseurship literature. It records the collection at the apex of Huīzōng’s empire-wide fǎngqiú programme, which had ingathered the holdings of the Five Dynasties courts and of the major private collections of the Northern Sòng (Sū Shì, Wáng Yǐn, Lǐ Gōnglín). Cài Tāo’s testimony, preserved in the Sìkù tíyào, makes clear that the catalogue was compiled by a team — likely under Mǐ Fú’s direction — and not by Huīzōng personally, the imperial preface notwithstanding. The work’s organisation by genre and within-genre by date became the canonical model for all subsequent imperial and private painting catalogues, including the Qīng Shíqú bǎojí KR3h0063. The Sìkù editors, following Wáng Kěntáng, identified internal contradictions (Wáng Shìyuán graded inconsistently across two sections, Xǔ Dàoníng’s praise unsubstantiated) as evidence of multi-hand compilation.
Translations and research
- Sirén, Osvald. The Chinese on the Art of Painting. Peking: Vetch, 1936 (selections).
- Yu, Hui. Imagining the Imperial Collection: The Northern Song Court and the Xuanhe Painting Catalogue. PhD diss., Yale University, 1999.
- Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008 (the standard Western-language study; treats the Huà-pǔ exhaustively).
- Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, and Maggie Bickford, eds. Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
- Sturman, Peter Charles. Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 (on the compilers).
Other points of interest
The catalogue’s near-total dispersal in 1126–27, when the Jurchen sacked Kāifēng, makes the Xuānhé huàpǔ the principal record of paintings lost or transferred to Jīn in that catastrophe — an indispensable resource for tracing the post-disaster history of pre-Sòng painting through the Jīn collection in Yānjīng and its eventual Yuán dispersal.