Yan Liben

Yan Liben was one of the most powerful men in Tang China, a minister who rose to chancellor under the emperor Gaozong around the year 669. He was also the most celebrated painter at the Tang court, and the two facts sat badly together. Court records tell of a day when the earlier emperor Taizong, resting by a garden pond with his officials, spotted some strange birds and called out for the painter Yan Liben to come and record them. Yan, already a ranking official, had to kneel at the water's edge and sketch while the courtiers watched, burning with shame at being summoned like a craftsman. He went home and told his son never to learn to paint.

In seventh-century China painting was admired while painters were treated as servants, and Yan spent his life on the emperor's business. He helped design a memorial hall hung with portraits of loyal generals, and he painted the rulers of past dynasties as moral lessons for the present one.

Two works still carry his name. The Thirteen Emperors, a long scroll portraying sovereigns of earlier dynasties and now in Boston, lets a Tang viewer weigh each reign by the bearing of the man. The other, known as the Bunian tu and surviving as a later copy in Beijing, shows Taizong carried on a litter as he receives the envoy of the Tibetan king, sent in 641 to arrange a royal marriage between the two courts.