The compelling image

Readers who assume Chinese painting cannot stand beside the work of El Greco or Cézanne will find their view challenged here. James Cahill argues that the art of China deserves the same serious attention given to European masters, and he writes with a calm, assured voice that makes the material accessible.

The book centers on the seventeenth century, a period of upheaval in which the Ming dynasty fell and the Manchus conquered China. Those events reshaped how painters and scholars lived and thought. Artists of the time were rethinking their relationship to nature and to the work of earlier generations, while techniques brought from Europe by Jesuit missionaries were quietly altering Chinese brushwork and composition.

Cahill guides the reader through a sequence of key contrasts in style and approach. He opens with Chang Hung, a comparatively overlooked painter who pushed traditional forms toward faithful depictions of the natural world, and sets him against the theorist Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, who transformed those same forms into bold abstractions. Later chapters examine Wu Pin, whose work raises contested claims about European influence and a revival of early Sung descriptive styles; Ch'en Hung-shou, the leading figure painter of the late Ming; the odd blend of real sitters and conventional settings in period portraiture; the expressive experiments of the Individualists, set apart from the Orthodox school; and a fresh assessment of Tao-chi, one of the most articulate painters of later China.

The book contains more than 250 illustrations, including twelve color plates, drawn from collections in the United States, Europe, Japan and China. It is written for anyone curious about China, its history and its art, and for enthusiasts who want to widen their appreciation of this period.