Research Items

Abstract

CHINESE FREscoEs FROM HONAN.—Frescoes described as “the most important works of art that have ever come out of China” have recently been acquired by the Museum of the University of Philadelphia and are figured and discussed by Miss Helen E. Fernald in the Museum Journal (Philadelphia), vol. 17, No. 3. Up till a few years ago it was thought that the great frescoes of the temples and palaces of the T'ang dynasty extolled in Chinese literature had long perished. Various expeditions to Turfan and the borders of western China had, however, discovered fragments of paintings unquestionably of this period, but showing signs of provincial workmanship. In 1925 the Museum acquired five mural paintings from a cave temple in Honan; but these, and others which appeared in America and Europe at the same time, were merely single figures cut from the walls and without definite data. They did no more than prove that early frescoes did still exist in China. Three panels have now been acquired which belong together and form part of an enormous picture which must have been at least forty feet long and twenty-five feet high, and of which the composition can be reconstructed with some probability. Of the three panels, the central represents Sakyamuni seated on a dais in the pddmasana position, with legs crossed and each foot resting on the opposite leg, sole uppermost. The left panel represents Avalokitesvara, the Bhodhisattva of Mercy, seated in European fashion. The righthand panel shows an important personage in robes befitting an emperor approaching the Buddha throne accompanied by a delicate female figure and followed by an official-looking individual. Two demon kings in fantastic armour are in the background. The three frescoes evidently represent three of the most important sections of a Paradise scene, such as appears again and again on the walls of caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Stylistic and other considerations assign the paintings to the latter part of the T'ang dynasty, about 845 A.D. or possibly thirty years later, and suggest as their possible source a mountain monastery of Honan.