Emperor Huizong was the last emperor of China's Northern Song Dynasty. He is regarded as an exemplary calligrapher, painter, and patron of the arts, and is indeed quite possibly the most famous painter and calligrapher among China's emperors.
His most famous works include the handscroll paintings "Five-Colored Parakeet"[1] and "Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk,"[2] and the hanging scroll painting "Auspicious Cranes" (below) along with a number of works of calligraphy in Huizong's distinctive "Slender Gold" style. Huizong is also known for his personal/Imperial collection of over six thousand paintings, and for his establishment of the Imperial Painting Academy. The Academy would continue on into the Southern Song Dynasty, and would be revived in the Ming and Qing Dynasties as a body of official court painters, each of whom enjoyed formal court rank and worked producing artworks for the Court for a variety of official purposes.
Though a celebrated figure in the history of Chinese art, Huizong is also considered to have been a rather weak emperor in political terms, and is generally seen in rather negative terms, as his reign saw the loss of northern China (the Yellow River Valley) to the Jurchen hordes of the Jin Dynasty. The Jin captured the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng, and took Huizong and much of the Imperial family prisoner. While one of his sons, who had not been present in Kaifeng at the time, continued the Song Dynasty as Emperor Gaozong in a new southern capital at Lin'an (Hangzhou), Huizong spent the rest of his life, the next ten years, a captive of the Jurchens, dying in 1135.
References
- Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire, New York: W.W. Norton & Co (2000), 276.