Drawn to comparison

Instead, Chinese art tends to emphasize the moral quality, vitality and spirit of the horse itself. From Han tomb reliefs to Tang (618-907) sculptures and Song (960-1279) paintings, horses appear not as props of power, but as living beings endowed with character.

This distinction is especially evident in the Tang Dynasty, often regarded as the golden age of Chinese horse imagery. The Tang court prized horses from Central Asia, emblems of the dynasty’s openness and cosmopolitan reach. Yet works, such as the celebrated Stone Reliefs of the Six Steeds, installed at the mausoleum of the second Tang emperor Li Shimin, commemorate not imperial vanity, but shared hardship.

The horses are shown without the emperor astride them; instead, they stand alone, or, in one striking scene, accompanied by a man — one of the emperor’s generals — pulling an arrow from a wounded steed. The gesture is met not with resistance, but with trust, underscoring a bond forged in battle, rather than a display of sovereign power.

So where, then, were the emperors and generals, if not depicted on horseback? “In the gardens,” replies Maxwell Hearn, a leading curator of Chinese painting in the United States and head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Asian Art.

“You don’t see paintings from that period of a conquering general planting a flag on a beach. Instead, the Chinese elite preferred to be shown in their own gardens,” he says.

“Above all, they wished to be remembered not as bureaucrats or rulers of the state, but as gentlemen versed in the refined arts of painting, calligraphy, music and chess.”

This preference helps explain the near absence of mounted rulers in Chinese art, as well as the quieter treatment of horses themselves. Chinese painters from the Song Dynasty onward — the likes of Li Gonglin, Zhao Mengfu, Ren Renfa — often portrayed horses in moments of stillness: grazing, bathing or resting.