Antique Silk Handscroll Narrative Painting With Landscape, Figures and Dragon Motifs, 10th Century Medieval China

拍品描述

Dimensions: Total horizontal length 1023 cm (402.76 in), vertical height 46 cm (18.11 in). A 10th-century ancient silk painting miscellaneous artwork. Condition and Provenance: The entire silk scroll is well-preserved, with no major tears or missing pieces. The silk base has darkened to a deep brown over thousands of years, with slight natural wear and minor thread loss at the edges. The main mineral pigments are well-preserved, with clearly visible brushstrokes for figures, boats, auspicious dragons, and rocks, showing no signs of later repainting or extensive color modification. The scroll maintains good flexibility and is free of insect damage. This artwork was unearthed from an ancient tomb in northern China in its early years, consigned to an antique gallery in London in the 1990s, and acquired in 2024 by a private collector of ancient paintings in New York, USA. New York, Vancouver, and London are major global trading centers for antique paintings and miscellaneous works. Description: This enormous antique silk narrative handscroll is extremely rare, an exceptionally long silk painting artwork from medieval China, exceeding ten meters in length, a size rarely seen in paintings of the same period. This handscroll, painted on thick ancient silk and colored with natural mineral pigments, is a continuous narrative scroll divided into two main scenes: a river cruise and landscape, and a sea wave and a divine dragon. The left side depicts a two-story river cruise, with several nobles in ancient robes seated inside, while boatmen row on the shimmering water. The distant mountains are colored with azurite and malachite mineral pigments, and the distinct layers of trees vividly showcase medieval ship construction and customs. The right side depicts a turbulent sea, with a colorful dragon weaving through the waves. Its scales are adorned with vermilion and bluestone pigments, and a young girl leans against the railing of a pavilion, watching the dragon, creating a complete and coherent romantic story of an encounter between humans and mythical beasts. The brushwork follows the techniques of medieval figure and landscape painting, with bold and powerful lines and rich, deep colors. This long silk handscroll carries a complete narrative, possessing both historical documentary value and ancient artistic aesthetic value. Creating such a massive silk handscroll required an enormous amount of silk and manpower, and its long-term preservation was even more challenging; a ten-meter-long medieval painted handscroll in perfect condition is extremely rare. This handscroll directly records medieval shipbuilding techniques, architectural styles, mythological beliefs, ancient clothing, and classical landscape painting techniques, making it an irreplaceable source of material for the study of ancient folklore, art, and mythological systems. This painting is highly sought after by antique painting collectors and private art museums in Europe, America, and Canada, and is considered an extremely rare and precious treasure among various antique painting collections.

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