In the field of Chinese art history, James Cahill is without doubt a national treasure. As Craig Clunas reminded us in his “Afterward” to Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming [Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2004, p. 180], there was a time when Professor Cahill defended the amateur approach of the literati artists of the Ming dynasty Wu school. Given his groundbreaking contributions to the study of literati landscape paintings, it may come as a surprise that Professor Cahill's latest work concerns what some might term lowbrow paintings from an understudied late time period. This book focuses on colorful figure paintings from the period 1644 to 1800: many of beautiful women (the meiren genre); some for the commemoration or delectation of emperors; and the lion's share products of professional urban studios catering to functional events, the well-to-do, or commercial commissions. Cahill offers evidence that Qing courtesans and gentry women at times commissioned these sorts of vernacular works themselves (p. 32, pp. 124–29). The book has the following chapters: Recognizing Vernacular Painting; Studio Artists in City and Court; Adoptions from the West; The Artist's Repertories; and Beautiful Women and the Courtesan Culture.
As Cahill points out, most of these paintings were rarely displayed in museums, tended to be misattributed if signed at all, and were brought out for his perusal with some reluctance. (Concerning an image of a nubile Chinese woman preparing to bathe, he imagines one curator wondering “Can his interest in beautiful-woman paintings descend to so crude an example as this?” [p. 188]). Even so, he parses out Northern style figures from Southern style figures, earlier Qing paintings from those of later Qing, cool erotic works from hot erotic works, and palace paintings from urban studio works. He distinguishes Chinese works that adopt aspects of Italianate one-point perspective from works incorporating new spatial divisions such as rooms beyond rooms (or scenes seen through windows) in a more Dutch or Flemish mode (p. 80).
Cahill argues that in China significant absorptions of European-based pictorial ideas began at least in the late Ming (p. 77), and adds that refusing to recognize these appropriations does no service to Chinese art (p. 95). In the main, these are convincing contentions—Western-style shading and the pronounced awareness of anatomical features such as eye sockets, for example, seem apparent in the portrait works of Tseng Qing, which Professor Cahill mentions. He distinguishes these types of appropriations, which fit specific needs—for example making beautiful women appear to inhabit a believable or beckoning space—from the more blanket concept of “influence,” which disregards the rhetorical purpose and specific quality of the appropriations (p. 68). This is all to the good. However, where Cahill argues for a Northern Chinese version of these appropriations, discernible in Cui Zizhong's late Ming work (p. 86), more convincing evidence is required.
The scope of Cahill's investigation, by his own admission, is limited to topics that interest him, and he forthrightly excludes popular subjects such as Buddhist or Daoist works, bird-and-flower decorative paintings, and court art outside the meiren or portrait-in-a-garden genres. These are understandable choices. Other books exist on the visual programs of the Qing emperors and the leaning of Qing Buddho-literati artists towards an urban public market. Very few works, however, have seriously dealt with the production of less famous professional artists in the Qing urban setting.
In his conclusion, Cahill rightly asserts—in a curmudgeonly way—that connoisseurship skills ought to be revived (pp. 200–201). As he puts it: “It might be asked: Why is it important to pin [the authorship of the paintings] down at all?…The answer is obvious…If the works are to be studied in a larger social context…the context must be the right one” (p. 167). Touché.
We might argue that Professor Cahill leans to both sides of the (now increasingly distant) theory/connoisseurship divide. His readings of eroticized female imagery are much intertwined with studies emerging from the “race, class, and gender” wave. In fact, in his introduction, Cahill looks to literary studies trending away from elite materials to lead Chinese art history out of its provinciality (p. 4). His study makes conceptual contributions on the topics of visualization of space, the circulation of artists between city and court, and permutations on the theme of desire. However, this book's strengths lie most powerfully in the insights of Cahill's own keen eye (see, for example, his discussions of Yu Zhiding's paintings of women waiting for lovers, pp. 178–80). It is beneficial in this regard that the book is presented with copious color illustrations throughout.
This is a work of considerable courage and originality, both in its chosen themes and in Cahill's revisionist approach to his own earlier work. He provides long footnotes generously documenting leads on particular artists or genres. He even includes his e-mail address in the preface (p. viii), inviting further contact. Not once but throughout the book, Professor Cahill's most persistent message to art historians is simply, “Keep going!”
