Painting and private life in eleventh-century China : Mountain villa by Li Gonglin
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Painting and private life in eleventh-century China : Mountain villa by Li Gonglin
Princeton University Press, c1998
Available at 14 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [119]-148) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In the eleventh century, the focus of Chinese painting shifted dramatically. The subject matter of most earlier works of art was drawn from a broadly shared heritage of political, religious, and literary themes. Late in the century, however, a group of scholar-artists began to make paintings that reflected the private experiences of their own lives. Robert Harrist argues here that no work illuminates this development more vividly than Mountain Villa, a handscroll by the renowned artist Li Gonglin (ca. 1041-1106). Through a detailed reading of the painting and an analysis of its place in the visual culture of Li's time, the author offers a new explanation for the emergence of autobiographic content in Chinese art. Harrist proposes that the subject of Li's painting - his garden in the Longmian Mountains - was itself a form of self-representation, since a garden was then considered a reflection of its owner's character and values. He demonstrates also that Li's turn toward the imagery of private life was inspired by the conventions of Chinese lyric poetry, in which poets recorded and responded to the experiences of their lives.
The book draws the reader into the artistic, scholarly, and political world of Li Gonglin and shows the profound influence of Buddhism on Chinese painting and poetry. It offers important insights not just into Chinese art, but also into Chinese literature and intellectual history.
Table of Contents
<TABLE><TR><TD> <TD>Acknowledgments <TR><TD>Ch. 1 <TD>The Face behind the Fan: Li Gonglin and Northern Song Painting <TR><TD>Ch. 2 <TD>A Walk through the Longmian Mountains <TR><TD>Ch. 3 <TD>The Transformed Landscape: Place and Persona in Northern Song Gardens <TR><TD>Ch. 4 <TD>Evoking the Past: Memories of Wang Wei and Lu Hong <TR><TD>Ch. 5 <TD>Mountain Villa and the Languages of Landscape in Eleventh-Century China <TR><TD>Ch. 6 <TD>Conclusion: Painting and Private Life <TR><TD>Appendix <TD>The Extant Copies of Mountain Villa <TR><TD> <TD>Notes <TR><TD> <TD>Bibliography <TR><TD> <TD>Glossary of Chinese Characters <TR><TD> <TD>Index <TR><TD> <TD>Illustrations
by "Nielsen BookData"