Stag Hunt

Huang Zongdao

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

As he hits his prey, the hunter on his pony is ready with a second arrow in his left hand. The powerful horse is shown in an animated “flying gallop,” with bulging muscles suggesting the frenzied excitement of the chase, while the delicately rendered deer presents a moving portrait of a gentle victim and death. Hunting was an ancient aristocratic pastime, especially favored as a pictorial theme by the naturalized nomad painter Prince Li Zanhua, to whom this painting was once attributed. By the late Northern Song period, scholar-critics had begun to treat the hunting scene as an allegory of violence and greed. Both the painting style and the psychological interpretation of the subject matter suggest an early-twelfth-century date for this work. An unusually fine collection of colophons is attached to the scroll. In 1352 Zhu Derun (1294–1365) attributed the painting to Li Zanhua. Three other fourteenth-century colophons are followed by a poem by the great Suzhou painter Shen Zhou (1427–1509). The senselessness of violence, as portrayed by the hunt, is lamented by all the colophon writers

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art