Eastern Art Forms

Large cats such as lions and tigers were frequently painted or sculpted as images of power and leadership, from Persia to India and on to China. 

In Persia, lions were symbols of royalty and can often be found on the walls and pillars of ancient palaces such as the magnificent ruins of Isfahan.

In China, the tiger is considered the "Lord of the Beasts," and features heavily in  myth and symbolism. As the cat spread eastward, it naturally basked in the glory of its larger relatives, and consequently found its own related niche in art.

Artists had little difficulty in capturing the essence of these relatives of the venerated lion and tiger.
 
Eastern art forms, although highly structured and stylized, can be vividly natural and much truer to feline behavior than contemporaneous Western art.

In Eastern art, bicolors and tortie-and-white cats are by far the most commonly portrayed, suggesting that those patterns were preferred by the travelers who took the cat to Asia, or by the people who lived there.