Han Gan
The painter of horses.
Han Gan painted Emperor Xuanzong's horses at the Tang court. The imperial steed Night-Shining White in the Metropolitan Museum is his most famous work.
Han Gan was born around 706 and died around 783. According to tradition he came from a poor family in Chang'an and worked as an errand boy at a wine shop. While delivering wine to the poet Wang Wei he is said to have drawn in the sand, and Wang Wei saw his talent and paid for his training. The story is hard to verify but has followed him through history.
Han Gan became a court painter to Emperor Xuanzong, who loved horses and kept large stables with thousands of animals. He specialised in painting the imperial horses. According to a well-known anecdote, the emperor wanted him to study an older horse painter, but Han Gan replied that the horses in the emperor's stables were his teachers.
His most famous surviving work is Night-Shining White, a portrait of one of the emperor's favourite horses, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The horse is tethered to a post and rears with wild eyes and a flying mane. The picture is covered with seals and inscriptions by later collectors, including emperors, which shows how highly it was valued.
His horses are round, sturdy and alive. The poet Du Fu criticised him for painting the flesh but not the bones – in other words, for making the horses too fat. Later critics held the opposite view, that he had captured the horses' inner strength. Han Gan is regarded as the foremost horse painter in Chinese art, and horse painting became a genre of its own that lived on right up to Xu Beihong in the 20th century.