Hong Kong Palace Museum | Grand Gallop: Art and Culture of the Horse

9001. Rubbings from the Wu Family Shrines Showing a Scene of Traveling on Carriage and Horse

Rubbing from the Wu Family Shrines Showing a Scene of Traveling on Carriage and Horse

The Wu Liang Shrine in Jiaxiang county, Shandong province, provides compelling evidence of the status of the horse in ancient China.

Built by the Wu family during the Eastern Han dynasty, the shrine was used for ancestral veneration. This was of great importance to the Han people, who revered the teachings of Confucius and valued filial piety. One of the earliest and best-preserved examples of its type, the walls and roof of the shrine are carved with relief sculptures that are rich with cultural symbolism. The rubbings shown in this exhibition were made during the Qing dynasty, many centuries after the shrine was built.

The Han dynasty was a golden age for funerary art in China, which often features images of daily life, mythology, and the afterlife. Similar themes are expressed in the stone reliefs of the shrine, which depict heaven, the dwelling places of gods and goddesses in Mount Penglai and Kunlun, historical figures, and allusions to ancient texts, such as Legends of Filial Sons, Biographies of Exemplary Women, and Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian.

On the roof of the shrine, which represents the realm of heaven, reliefs show horses alongside various auspicious creatures. The reliefs on the walls of the shrine focus on the earthy realm, with images of people traveling on horse-drawn carriages demonstrating their use in daily life.

© The Palace Museum

9002. Yellow glazed roof tiles of the celestial horse and the sea horse

Celestial horse (yellow glazed tile)

Sea horse (yellow glazed tile)

These two roof-tiles from Forbidden City are ornamented with a celestial horse and sea horse, known in Chinese as tianma and haima, respectively. These creatures are auspicious symbols thought to protect against misfortune and evil spirits.

The roofs of the most important palaces of the Forbidden City have a main ridge, from which four vertical ridges extend to create four corners that curve slightly upwards. The roof-tiles on display would have rested on these corners.

In addition to warding off misfortune, roof-tiles like these also prevented water leakage and rusting, while strengthening the overall structure of the roof. They are widely used in traditional Chinese architecture, with the number and form of the tiles used determined by the importance of the building and the social status of its occupants.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony was one of the most important structures in the Forbidden City. Its roof-tiles were ornamented with a line-up of ten figures, including a dragon, phoenix, lion, celestial horse, sea horse, suan ni (a lion with scales), a fish with front claws, unicorn, bull, and xingshen—a winged, monkeylike beast.

The tiles are made of clay, which was dried, soaked, pulverized, and moulded into shape before being fired at a high temperature in a coal burning kiln. This process hardened the clay and made it resistant to water. The tiles were then covered in a lead-based glaze and fired again at a low temperature in a wood-burning kiln. The result was a glaze that is glossy, smooth, and flat, like glass. Glazed tiles come in geometric and figurative forms and many colours, including yellow, and green, red, blue, black, purple, and white, can create striking decorative effects.

The installation above conjures the presence of flying horses throughout the gallery. The hanging screens act as windows that open into an eternal mythological space, offering glimpses of the creatures as they spread their wings and soar across the skies. The celestial horse and dragon-like horse (longma) are works of art from the Palace Museum. The two images of Pegasus are extracts from a Greek pottery vessel made around the fourth century BCE, and an Islamic celestial globe from around 1700, both from the collection of the Louvre.

© The Palace Museum

9004. Tapestry with scene of Battle on the Plateau from Story of Scipio

Tapestry Featuring Battle on the Plateau from Story of Scipio

Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins

The exhibition Grand Gallop explores the horse in art through objects from all over the world. This tapestry, titled Battle on the Plateau from the Story of Scipio, is one of thirteen objects on loan from the Louvre Museum.

Completed in 1689, it was produced by the Gobelins Manufactory, which supplied tapestries to the French court beginning in the reign of Louis XIV, who ruled from 1638 to 1715.

Originally established as a dye-house in Paris in the fifteenth century, the manufactory thrived under the leadership of the court painter Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), attracting skilled artisans from across Europe. The tapestries they produced were some of the finest in Europe at the time and were only supplied to royal palaces or given as gifts to members of the royal family.

The tapestry is modelled after a painting by Guilio Romano, an Italian painter of the sixteenth century. Romano is known for a series of twenty-two paintings based on the Roman general Scipio Africanus’ defeat of Hannibal Barca—a famous general of the Roman Republic’s greatest rival, Carthage.

The scene depicts the Battle of Baecula, in which Scipio conquered Iberia (today’s Spain and Portugal) during the Second Punic War with Carthage, in the third century BCE. In this important battle, Scipio attacked Hannibal’s younger brother, Hasdrubal Barca, forcing his army to withdraw to Gaul.

© The Palace Museum

9005. Jean-Denis Attiret, Ten Tribute Horses

Jean Denis Attiret (1702-1768 AD)

Ten Tribute Horses

Many of the works in the exhibition Grand Gallop reveal how artistic depictions of horses from different cultures combine to create innovative, hybrid forms of art.

During the early Qing dynasty, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholic missionaries from Europe were sent to the Forbidden City to serve as court artists. They brought with them artistic techniques, materials, and technologies that had a dramatic effect on Chinese art.

One of the most well-known was Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian-Jesuit painter who arrived in China during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. One of his masterpieces is a monumental set of paintings that portrays ten tribute horses gifted to the court in the early years of Qianlong’s reign. This work, Ten Tribute Horses, is a copy of Castiglione’s set of paintings. It was produced by Jean Denis Attiret, another important Jesuit painter active during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign. Although Attiret carefully reproduced the postures and colours of the horses in Castiglione’s paintings, his works are presented on a smaller scale, as album leaves.

In this traditional Chinese format, calligraphy and paintings are bound together in album, with each section composed of two pages folded at the middle and mounted with calligraphy on the left and painting on the right. The front and back of the album is protected by a silk cover featuring an inscription by the Qing calligrapher Zhang Zhao. Comprising ten sections, this album is the only known work that includes Attiret’s signature.

Paintings like those of Castiglione and Attiret are a remarkable combination of East and the West. By merging elements of Western realism with traditional Chinese conventions of composition and brushwork, they created a new court aesthetic—demonstrating the powerful role art can play in cultural exchange.

The exhibition closes with a lenticular display by Hong Kong-based Jeffrey Shaw, inspired by the series of ten monumental portraits of tribute horses painted by Giuseppe Castiglione and a similar work of smaller scale by Jean-Denis Attiret—two Jesuit artists active at the Qing court in the eighteenth century. The lenticular display casts the volumetric grandeur of Castiglione’s paintings and the landscape elements of Attiret’s album leaves in new light. Represented as a stream of consciousness, some of the horses play with each other, and the rhythmic arrangement of the white horses—a leitmotif of the exhibition—enhances the theatricality of the fantastical procession.

© The Palace Museum