the whole scene being drawn in gilt outlines on a dark blue back-ground, is dated "Tau-kuang, 1832". In the majority of cases pictures, if dated at all, contain merely the cyclical date characters of the year, in which they were signed, thus sometimes leaving us in doubt by as much as sixty years backward or forward. We are, however, quite safe when the Emperor's reign is added, as in these cases. Kai K'i may thus safely be placed between the years 1795 and 1832, as far as his working period is concerned. He may have been alive some years on this side of 1832.

58. P'an Kung-shóu (, also called Shön-fu,, and Lién-ch'au,), a native of Chinkiang, showing talent and inclination towards landscape-painting. Wang Wön-chï took him into his house after his retirement from his post in Yün-nan. Like most good painters he educated his style by copying old masters, and he repaid the kindness of his patron by working day and night, until he was a painter. His Buddhas are placed on a level with those of Ting Yün-p'öng, who made the best Buddhist portraits in linear drawing during the 16. century (cf. Giles, p. 163) and Wu Lin (), who also cultivated linear work about A.D. 1600 and who could change a scrap of paper with a few dashes of his brush into a precious jewel.

59. Ku Hai (, also called Tsing-han,, Hiang-süé,

, and Si-meï-kü-shï,

E†), born in Ch'ang-shu

near Soochow, painted landscapes and human figures. He was also a good hand at writing old seal characters. One of his pictures in my collection is dated 1831.

60. Huang Hau (, also called Shï-p'ing,

), a native

of Chinkiang, and brother-in-law of Wang Wön-chi, painted flowers and birds with "the extreme of life's motion" (H

,Mo-hiang-kü-hua-shï, ch. 9, p. 7), this being the highest praise that could be bestowed on an artist's work according to Sié Ho's "Six Canons". "Life's motion" is a term which, like the German word "Stimmung", it is next to impossible to define. It does not mean "motion" pure and simple. The Chinese will say of a landscape, a tree, or even a rock, that it is drawn with "life's motion", if it fulfills certain artistic conditions. I could not furnish any better illustration of this term than a picture drawn by Huang Hau. It is entitled "K'in Kau and the Red Carp" (E), and the artist describes it as the copy of a picture by Sü Wön-ch'ang, i. e. Sü Weï (

長), an ingenious artist of the Ming (lived from 1521 to 1593), whose very ink-blots were looked upon as works of art by his contemporaries and whose scenes of life are likewise credited.

with possessing "life's motion in the highest degree" (

wön,

; in his biography, from the Yüé-hua-kiénH, quoted in the Hua-jön-sing-shï-lu, chap. 2,

p. 17). Here we have the term applied by native critics to two artists, whose work appears united in this one picture, which we may thus fairly expect to give us a practical lesson as to the meaning of the term. Sü Weï's biographer says that the copying of his pictures were hard nuts to crack even for the best masters; it is, therefore, all the more complimentary to Huang Hau, the copyist, that he could turn out such work. I have always laid the greatest stress on the judgement of practical artists, they being the only persons who can realize the difficulty of bringing out certain effects in color from their own experience. When I showed Huang Hau's "Red Carp" picture to Professor Carl Gussow now in Munich, he would not believe it to be a copy; the entire conception, he thought, was so free and independent that it was bound to be an original. And yet we have Huang