Five-colored Parakeet on a Blossoming Apricot Tree

The bird on this branch was a gift from far away. In the poem written beside the painting, Emperor Huizong explains that the five-coloured parakeet came from beyond Lingnan, the far south of his empire, and was kept in the palace grounds, tame and lovely, flying freely about its enclosure. One spring it settled among the apricot blossom, and the emperor had the moment recorded. For Huizong a creature like this was more than a pet. A rare bird arriving at court and thriving there was read as a sign from Heaven that the reign was a good one, and in the 1110s he had a number of such auspicious events painted and inscribed. Whose brush made the painting is a separate question. The inscription is very probably his own. The historian of Chinese painting James Cahill thought the emperor likely painted the parakeet himself and left the branch and blossoms to painters of his court academy. The scroll later passed through the hands of a 14th-century Yuan emperor and of the Qing emperors Qianlong and Jiaqing, then to Prince Gong, a 19th-century Qing statesman, and by 1927 to a collector in Tokyo. The museum bought it from a New York dealer in 1933.