Huizong
The emperor who was an artist.
Emperor Huizong of Song was a brilliant painter and calligrapher who founded a painting academy but lost his empire to the Jurchen in 1127.
Huizong was born in 1082 as Zhao Ji, a son of Emperor Shenzong of the Northern Song dynasty. He was not expected to become emperor, but when his brother died without sons he ascended the throne in 1100. Even as a prince he was deeply interested in art, calligraphy, music and Daoism.
As emperor Huizong became one of history's greatest patrons of art. He reformed the court painting academy and introduced examinations in which painters had to illustrate a line from a poem in an ingenious way. He had the imperial collections of paintings, calligraphy and ancient bronzes catalogued, and the collections became enormous. He demanded that painters study nature closely. According to one story, he pointed out that a peacock stepping up onto something always lifts its left foot first, something the court painters had missed.
Huizong was himself a skilled artist. He developed his own script, “slender gold”, with thin, springy lines and sharp angles. Several paintings of birds and flowers bear his name, for example Auspicious Cranes of 1112 in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, in which cranes fly over a palace roof against a turquoise sky. It is often unclear whether he painted the pictures himself or whether the academy's painters made them in his name.
As a politician he was less successful. His costly building projects, including an imperial garden with rare rocks transported from all over the empire, caused discontent. In 1125–1126 the Jurchen Jin state attacked. Huizong abdicated in favour of his son, but in 1127 the capital Kaifeng was taken and both were captured and carried off to the north. Huizong died in captivity in 1135.
Posterity has seen him both as a failed ruler and as one of the most gifted artists ever to sit on a Chinese throne. His script and his academy influenced court painting in the Southern Song, and his collections laid the foundation for much of what we know about earlier Chinese art.