Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Han Gan
Tang horse painter, discovered as a tavern hand by Wang Wei, who told Xuanzong that the palace stable horses were his only teachers
A desk holds an unrolled sheet bearing three bold black ink strokes, with a rack of many brushes above it, a stone ink slab and ink stick, a porcelain bowl, a red lacquer box, a dish of red seal paste and a paperweight; a small seated figure shows through a round window onto bamboo.
Han Gan is called a man of Daliang in the Record of Famous Painters of All Dynasties (Lidai minghua ji), though other accounts place him at Chang'an or Lantian. As a poor youth he worked for a wine shop and came to Wang Wei's house to collect debts; Wang saw the men and horses he sketched on the ground and paid him twenty thousand cash a year to study painting for more than ten years. Summoned to court early in the Tianbao era, he was told by Xuanzong to learn from the horse painter Chen Hong, and answered that he already had teachers: the horses in the palace stables. He rose to assistant in the Court of the Treasury. Du Fu's poem 'Song of Painting' complained that he painted the flesh of horses but not the bone, a charge Zhang Yanyuan dismissed. The handscroll Night-Shining White attributed to him is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Herding Horses is in the National Palace Museum, Taipei.
Life and times
Dates c. 706 CE–c. 783 CE