Winner of the Shimada Prize for Outstanding Work of East Asian Art
History By the end of the sixth century CE, both the royal courts
and the educated elite in China were collecting works of art,
particularly scrolls of calligraphy and paintings done by known
artists. By the time of Emperor Huizong (1082-1135) of the Song
dynasty (960-1279), both scholars and the imperial court were
cataloguing their collections and also collecting ancient bronzes
and rubbings of ancient inscriptions. The catalogues of Huizong's
painting, calligraphy, and antiquities collections list over 9,000
items, and the tiny fraction of the listed items that survive today
are all among the masterpieces of early Chinese art. Patricia
Ebrey's study of Huizong's collections places them in both
political and art historical context. The acts of adding to and
cataloguing the imperial collections were political ones, among the
strategies that the Song court used to demonstrate its patronage of
the culture of the brush, and they need to be seen in the context
of contemporary political divisions and controversies. At the same
time, court intervention in the art market was both influenced by,
and had an impact on, the production, circulation, and imagination
of art outside the court. Accumulating Culture provides a rich
context for interpreting the three book-length catalogues of
Huizong's collection and specific objects that have survived. It
contributes to a rethinking of the cultural side of Chinese
imperial rule and of the court as a patron of scholars and the
arts, neither glorifying Huizong as a man of the arts nor
castigating him as a megalomaniac, but rather taking a hardheaded
look at the political and cultural ramifications of collecting and
the reasons for choices made by Huizong and his curators. The
reader is offered glimpses of the magnificence of the collections
he formed and the disparate fates of the objects after they were
seized as booty by the Jurchen invaders in 1127. The heart of the
book examines in detail the primary fields of collecting --
antiquities, calligraphy, and painting. Chapters devoted to each of
these use Huizong's catalogues to reconstruct what was in his
collection and to probe choices made by the cataloguers. The acts
of inclusion, exclusion, and sequencing that they performed allowed
them to influence how people thought of the collection, and to
attempt to promote or demote particular artists and styles. This
book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese art
history, social history, and culture, as well as art collectors.
Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation.
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