The Compelling Image

Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

“A book of immense breadth...With its profundity and richness...this book is one no serious student of Chinese art can afford to be without.”—Ellen Johnston Laing, Ars Orientalis

The definitive study of the evolution of Chinese painting during the tumultuous seventeenth century.

In The Compelling Image, one of the foremost experts on Chinese art explores the radiant paintings produced during the tumultuous period of the Manchu conquest of China. As the Ming dynasty crumbled, brilliant masters of the seventeenth century reconsidered their artistic relationship to nature and to the painting of earlier times, while European pictorial arts introduced by Jesuit missionaries profoundly influenced Chinese techniques.

James Cahill’s authoritative survey begins with a relatively neglected artist, Chang Hung, who moved traditional forms ever closer to literal descriptions of nature, in contrast with the theorist painter Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, who turned the same traditional forms into powerful abstractions. A chapter focused on Wu Pin offers bold and controversial arguments about the impact of European art, as well as a related phenomenon: the revival of the highly descriptive early Sung styles. Looking closely at Ch’en Hung-shou, the greatest of the late Ming figure painters, Cahill examines a curious mixing of real people and conventionally rendered surroundings in portrait art of the period. He analyzes the expressionist experiments of the masters known as Individualists, and distinguishes these artists from the Orthodox school, concluding with a bold reassessment of the most eloquent of later Chinese painters, Tao-chi.

Richly illustrated with over 250 images drawn from collections in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China, The Compelling Image is an essential guide to an exquisite era of Chinese art history.