where he resided till 1717, returning then to Malines, where he died on the 1st of June 1727.
Though most of his pictures were composed for cabinets rather than churches, he sometimes emulated Van Artois in the production of large sacred pieces, and for many years his Christ on the Road to Emmaus adorned the choir of Notre Dame of Malines. In the gallery of Nantes, where three of his small landscapes are preserved, there hangs an Investment of Luxembourg, by Van der Meulen, of which he is known to have laid in the background. The two national galleries of London and Edinburgh contain each one example of his skill. Blenheim, too, and other private galleries in England, possess one or more of his pictures. But most of his works are on the Continent,—four a-piece in the Louvre, Augsburg, and Stuttgart; three a-piece in Berlin, Brunswick, Cologne, and Munich; two in Cassel and St Petersburg; one at Antwerp, Brussels, Carlsruhe, Copenhagen, Dresden, and Hanover.
HUYSUM, Jan van (1682–1749), was born at Amsterdam in 1682, and died in his native city on the 8th of February 1749. He was the son of Justus van Huysum, whose practice remained entirely local, but who is said to have been expeditious in decorating doorways, screens, and vases. A picture by this artist is still preserved in the gallery of Brunswick, representing Orpheus and the Beasts in a wooded landscape, and here we have some explanation of his son’s fondness for landscapes of a conventional and Arcadian kind; for Jan van Huysum, though skilled as a painter of still life, believed himself to possess the genius of a landscape painter. Half his pictures in public galleries are landscapes, views of imaginary lakes and harbours with impossible ruins and classic edifices, and woods of tall and motionless trees,—the whole very glossy and smooth, and entirely lifeless. The earliest dated work of this kind is that of 1717, in the Louvre, a grove with maidens culling flowers near a tomb, ruins of a portico, and a distant palace on the shores of a lake bounded by mountains. In the picture market these landscapes are worth comparatively little, whilst the master’s fruit and flower pieces are all the more appreciated, and good examples readily fetch from £800 to £900. It is doubtful whether any artist in this peculiar walk of art ever surpassed Van Huysum in representing fruit and flowers. It has been said that his fruit has no savour and his flowers have no perfume,—in other words, that they are hard and artificial,—but this is scarcely true. In substance fruit and flower are delicate and finished imitations of nature in its more subtle varieties of matter. The fruit has an incomparable blush of down, the flowers have a perfect delicacy of tissue. Van Huysum too shows supreme art in relieving flowers of various colours against each other, and often against a light and transparent background. He is always bright, sometimes even gaudy. Great taste and much grace and elegance are apparent in the arrangement of bouquets and fruit in vases adorned with bas reliefs or in baskets on marble tables. There is exquisite and faultless finish everywhere. But what Van Huysum has not is the breadth, the bold effectiveness, and the depth of thought of De Heem from whom he descends through Abraham Mignon.
Some of the finest of Van Huysum’s fruit and flower pieces have been in English private collections:—those of 1723 in the earl of Ellesmere’s gallery, others of 1730–32 in the collections of Hope and Ashburton. One of the best examples is now in the National Gallery (1736–37), which came from Mr Wells of Kedleaf and Abraham Darby. No public museum has finer and more numerous specimens than the Louvre, which boasts of four landscapes and six panels with still life; then come Berlin and Amsterdam with four fruit and flower pieces; then St Petersburg, Munich, Hanover, Dresden, The Hague, Brunswick, Vienna, Carlsruhe, and Copenhagen.
HWEN T’SANG (Hiouen Thsang, Hiwen T’sang) is the most eminent representative of a remarkable and valuable branch of Chinese literature, known during the last half century, chiefly through the labours of Continental scholars. It consists of the narratives of Chinese Buddhists who travelled to India, whilst their religion flourished there, with the view of visiting the sites consecrated by the history of Sakya Muni, of studying at the great convents which then existed in India, and of collecting books, reliques, and other sacred objects. In short, their objects and their narratives bear a strong analogy to the objects and narratives of the many pilgrimages to Palestine in the same and later ages which have come down to us in ecclesiastical collections.
The importance of these writings as throwing light on the geography and history of India and adjoining countries, during a very dark period, is great, and they have been the subject of elaborate commentaries by students in our own day, some of the chief of which will be noted at the end of this article. Several Chinese memoirs of this kind appear to have perished; and especially to be regretted is a great collection of the works of travellers to India, religious and secular, in sixty books, with forty more of maps and illustrations, published at the expense of the emperor Kao-T’song of the T’ang dynasty, 666 a.d., with a preface from the imperial hand. We will mention the clerical travellers of this description who are known to us by name.
1. Shi-tao-’an (died 385) wrote a work on his travels to the “western lands” (an expression applying often to India), which is supposed to be lost. 2. Fa-hian travelled to India in 399, and returned by sea in 414. His work, called Fo-Kwé-Ki, or Memoirs on the Buddha Realms, has been translated by Abel-Rémusat and Landresse, and again into English by the Rev. S. Beale; Mr Laidlay of Calcutta also published a translation from the French, with interesting notes. 3. Hwai Seng and Sung-Yun, monks, travelled to India to collect books and reliques, 518–521. Their short narrative has been translated by the late Karl Fried. Neumann, and also by Mr Beale (along with Fa-hian). 4. Hwen T’sang, the subject of this notice. In relation to his travels there are two Chinese works, both of which have been translated with an immense appliance of labour and learning by M. Stanislas Julien, viz., (a) the Ta-T’ang-Si-Yu-Ki, or Memoirs on Western Countries issued by the T’ang Dynasty, which was compiled under the traveller’s own supervision, by order of the great emperor Tai-T’sung; and (b) a Biography of Hwen T’sang by two of his contemporaries. 5. The Itinerary of Fifty-six Religious Travellers, compiled and published under imperial authority, 730. 6. The Itinerary of Khi-Nie, who travelled (964–976) at the head of a large body of monks to collect books, &c. Neither of the last two has been translated.
Hwen T’sang was born in the district of Keu-Shi, near Honan-Fu, about 605, a period at which Buddhism appears to have had a powerful influence upon a large body of educated Chinese. From childhood grave and studious, he was taken in charge by an elder brother who had adopted the monastic life, in a convent at the royal city of Loyang in Honan. Hwen T’sang soon followed his brother’s example. For some years he travelled over China, teaching and learning, and eventually settled for a time at the capital Chang-ngan (now Si-ngan-fu in Shensi), where his fame for learning became great. The desire which he entertained to visit India, in order to penetrate all the doctrines of the Buddhist philosophy, and to perfect the collections of Indian books which existed in China, grew irresistible, and in August 629 he started upon his solitary journey, eluding with difficulty the strict prohibition which was in force against crossing the frontier.
