In this handsome and lavishly illustrated volume devoted to the Southern Song court painter Ma Yuan (fl. 1190–1230), surely the least studied (and most copied) among Chinese painters so famous, Richard Edwards provides a surpassingly concentrated examination of this artist within the wide-ranging context of late Song culture. At the very outset, we are provided with a firm historical basis for the book's focus on Ma's style (though no such basis is obligatory): Edwards suggests that Ma Yuan's achievement was built upon an artistic concentration that was enabled by the contemporary court structure, whereby painters were not allowed to enter the civil service (based on a decree by Emperor Renzong, r. 1023–63). Thus freed of any opportunity for official promotion, Ma was all the more driven to focus on the perfection of his art (p. 1).

While we might question the extent to which Renzong's 1056 decree influenced the Ma family profession, Edwards' establishment of this institutional constraint serves as an effective gateway to his own concentration on the “inner life” of Ma Yuan's painting. This is to say that the writer's primary goal is to provide an account of the inner vision of the artist as conveyed in his painting and informed by his skills, sources, and environment, as reflected (or not) in the current attributions. The author follows through on this “internal” emphasis while fully mastering a wide network of surrounding literary, historical, and physical data, especially complicated with so famous an artist. It is also in accord with this emphasis that Edwards stresses the agency of Ma Yuan himself (and his family) in the formation of his own style—a welcome departure from the more frequent, unquestioning acceptance of court patronage as the primary determinant of style in a professional painter.

In the introduction are helpfully gathered themes and facts regarding Ma Yuan's background and period of activity, including the six generations of Ma Yuan's ancestors and descendants who together comprised the important Ma family of court painters, and a short account of the royal patrons largely responsible for Ma's fame (Emperor Ningzong, r. 1194–1224, and his Empress Yang, who held power from 1225 to 1233). All this offers a firm basis on which to approach the following chapters; here also Edwards deftly summarizes an important aesthetic underlying those Southern Song works in which the calligraphy of aristocratic patrons was so famously and beautifully joined with the painting of court professionals. The subsequent eight chapters are defined by the different genres Ma painted, including two chapters devoted to portraits (one Buddhist, and one Confucian and Daoist). One recurring and well demonstrated theme is that, for all the selective posturing of his subject matter, which was often located in already artificial garden environments, Ma Yuan owed his primary deference to nature and natural process: “in a wider sense, Ma Yuan's insistence is on clinging to physical nature” (p. 71); “his is an art anchored to physical truth but one to which he consciously brings a personal order and skill, a focus and intensity that links special meaning to that truth” (p. 83). Thus is established an important foundation for the final chapter, “Transformations,” in which we get a fascinating view of Ma Yuan's afterlife, and larger stylistic orbit, as revealed through close examination of various Ma Yuan attributions that readers, too, will now find mannered or otherwise unconvincing. In his postface, Edwards argues for a return (another recurring theme of the book) to a more vision-based art historical approach.

Edwards' precise analyses and sharply-observed savorings of the individual paintings amount to this book's most valuable contribution, for these sections not only open our eyes to Ma Yuan's priorities and stylistic habits, they furthermore enable connections with other paintings and literary works, thus bringing into clarity Ma's full participation in his environment. We might parallel Ma Yuan's oeuvre, as treated by Edwards, with the flowering plum in Song culture: “it lent itself to a single probing focus in which the more it was examined, the more it revealed” (p. 58). Implicit throughout is full engagement in the act of close looking, the primary source from which all subsequent discoveries and conclusions follow, and all the more central in the consideration of knotty connoisseurship problems. At points the author's close looking is conveyed through language that, sometimes through unconventionality, seems designed to engender our own fresh viewing of the paintings: in connection with Liang Kai's Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountain we read of “the threatening lean and hover of mountain nature” (p. 22); in Scholars Conversing beneath Blossoming Plum Tree, “space becomes an eloquent statement of release” (p. 74). The book's complete fold-out reproductions of long handscrolls (some in color), a rarity even in well-funded art history publications, are very welcome, as are the footnotes rather than endnotes, and the presence of the original Chinese texts next to their translations.