Village Schoolroom, from the album Figures in Settings

Title inscription: 村塾圖
In Zhāng Hóng’s humorous take on a humble village schoolroom, a shabbily dressed teacher points to a line in a book, helping one student follow the text. Another boy reads the text aloud, kneeling on the ground as punishment for some misdeed. Next to him a smaller, pantsless boy stands ready with a stick to penalize any reading mistakes. Another boy, at the right in a blue robe, is secretly looking at another book, and has toys hidden behind books on the shelf under his desk. A woman sits just outside the schoolroom counting on her fingers, an empty basket next to her, suggesting that she has just sold her goods at the village market.

In imperial China, passing the grueling civil service examinations and receiving a position in the government bureaucracy was the surest route to wealth and status. Therefore, any family that could afford it had a son educated to prepare for the exams. This would have been a familiar scene to Zhāng Hóng’s elite scholarly clientele, its comical character enhanced by placing the figures in a lowly village setting.