One Hundred Horses

Giuseppe Castiglione's One Hundred Horses, painted in 1728 and held in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, is one of the most celebrated works produced at the Qing imperial court. Castiglione, a Jesuit lay brother from Milan, served as court painter under three emperors over fifty years, developing a unique synthesis of Western illusionism and Chinese painting conventions. This long horizontal scroll depicts horses in various states of rest and activity in a landscape, combining European attention to anatomical accuracy with Chinese brushwork and compositional conventions for horizontal narrative scrolls. The work demonstrates the extraordinary cultural exchange at the Qing court and remains a singular monument of cross-cultural artistic contact.

Castiglione blends Chinese ink and mineral pigment techniques with Western modeling to create form without fully adopting either tradition. Horses are depicted with anatomical precision absent from Chinese court painting, yet the spatial organization and handling of foliage follow Chinese conventions. The result is a distinctively hybrid visual language.