Gu Kaizhi
China's first known painter.
Gu Kaizhi was a court painter and theorist under the Eastern Jin. His works are known only from later copies, such as the Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies in the British Museum.
Gu Kaizhi was born around 344 in Wuxi in present-day Jiangsu province and died around 406. He lived under the Eastern Jin dynasty, a time when China was divided and the scholars of the south developed poetry, calligraphy and painting. He served as an adviser to powerful generals and was known as a witty and eccentric man. His contemporaries said he had three perfections: talent, painting and eccentricity.
No work by his own hand survives. He is known through texts and later copies. The most famous is the Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies in the British Museum in London, a scroll in ink and colour on silk illustrating a poem about how the women at court should conduct themselves. It is considered a very early copy, perhaps from the 5th to 8th centuries, but its dating is disputed. The scroll Nymph of the Luo River, based on a poem by Cao Zhi, survives in later copies, including one in the Palace Museum in Beijing.
Gu Kaizhi's lines have been compared to silk threads, or to the thread spun by a silkworm: thin, even and unbroken. The figures are tall and elegant, with fluttering ribbons and robes. He also wrote texts on painting. He held that the painter should capture a person's spirit, not merely their appearance, and that the eyes are what matter most. According to a well-known story, he waited several years before painting in the eyes of his portraits.
Later writers already counted Gu Kaizhi as one of China's first great painters. His ideas about conveying the spirit became central to Chinese art theory, and the Admonitions is one of the oldest surviving examples of Chinese scroll painting.