Chinese bulbuls on flowering crab apple
This painting encodes a visual pun called a rebus: the bulbul bird, known as the “white-headed old man” (baitou weng 白頭翁) in Chinese, combined with the crab-apple tree (haitang 海棠) evokes the phrase “white heads at the front of the hall” (tangshang baitou 堂上白頭), an auspicious wish for shared longevity for the matriarch and patriarch of a family. Though bearing a fake inscription and seals of the Northern Song emperor Huizong (1082–1135; r. 1100–25), this fine painting shows qualities of the fourteenth-century painters Wang Yuan and Zhang Zhong and may be dated to that time based on its style.
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