Castiglione was commissioned to paint One Hundred Horses in 1723, and it took five years to complete. It was presented to the newly enthroned Qianlong Emperor in late 1735. The finished silk scroll remained in the imperial collection before eventually being housed in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, while part of the original preparatory drawing is now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
One Hundred Horses is a really long silk scroll painting made by Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian painter who the Chinese called Lang Shining. He was actually a Jesuit missionary who went to China back in 1715 when he was only 27, but he ended up staying there for the rest of his life and became one of the most important painters at the Qing royal court, working for three different emperors: Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong.
The Yongzheng Emperor asked him to paint this scroll in 1723, and it wasn't a quick job at all — it actually took Castiglione five whole years to finish it, so it was done by 1728. What makes this painting so special is how huge it is (almost 8 meters long!) and the way it mixes two totally different painting styles together. Castiglione used the same materials Chinese painters always used, like ink and color on silk, but he painted the horses using European techniques like perspective and shading, which made them look really realistic and three-dimensional instead of flat like most Chinese paintings at the time. In the scroll you can see a hundred horses just doing normal horse things — some are eating grass, some are playing around, some are crossing a river, and some are just running free in the fields.
Funny enough, even though the painting was ready in 1728, the emperor who asked for it (Yongzheng) never actually got to see it. It only got shown to the court in 1735, after Qianlong became emperor, and he loved it so much that he made Castiglione his main court painter. Since you can't erase mistakes on silk, Castiglione had to draw the whole thing first on paper as practice before doing the real version.
Right now the finished silk painting is kept in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and the practice drawing he made is actually in the Met Museum in New York.
One Hundred Horses by Giuseppe Castiglione, also known as Lang Shining, presents a lively scene of one hundred horses across a wide natural landscape. The horses are shown in different poses and activities, with some grazing, resting, running, playing and moving through the water. Castiglione combines traditional Chinese painting with European techniques of perspective, shading and realistic modelling. The horses have carefully observed anatomy and three-dimensional forms, while the landscape uses the flowing composition associated with Chinese scroll painting. The long horizontal format allows the viewer to follow the scene gradually, creating a sense of movement and variety. The painting reflects the Qing court's interest in combining Chinese artistic traditions with European realism.
