Jiulao scroll of Huichang

[Huichang Jiulao Tu]

Huichang Jiulao Tu Volume, Song Dynasty, silk version, color setting, 28.2 cm vertically and 245.5 cm horizontally
This volume depicts the meeting of Bai Juyi and his friends when he lived in Xiangshan, Luoyang in the fifth year of the reign of Tang Huichang (845). Although the subject matter is people, the whole and details of the building are described accurately and meticulously. The waterside pavilion, houses, slab bridges, river embankments, guardrails, stone benches and even the furnishings in the house are clearly explained. It can be said that “the craftsman’s methods of taking bricks and wood are slightly different”, and can almost be constructed according to the drawing. The painter not only knows the structure and practice of the building in detail, but also has begun to pay attention to the artistic effect of making the viewer “look empty, if you can tiptoe” by using superb realistic skills and a certain degree of perspective painting to more realistically express the three-dimensional and transparent sense of the building’s three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional plane. What is more important is that the architecture in the picture adopts the boundary painting technique of the Northern Song Dynasty. The uniform lines are conducive to depicting the details of the complex structure and components of the building. This architectural painting method of ink and white drawing continued to the Yuan Dynasty and developed to the extreme.