Ebook: The great painters of China

With 198 illustrations, including 15 in colour. This is the long-awaited account of Chinese painting by a leading scholar in Chinese art history, Professor Max Loehr. The product of an experience and understanding acquired in a lifetime, The Great Painters of China is one of the classics of the subject.
The development of Chinese painting has always rested upon the achievements of its great masters. Art in China evolved a continuous tradition of artists reviving and interpreting in their own work the masterpieces of the past. Yet, being mindful of historic paintings and their creators was no inhibition to the later artists’ imagination and originality: painters such as Chao Meng-fu and Wang Meng, Shen Chou, Tung Chei-cheang, and the Four Wangs fully asserted their own personalities and styles, setting up a kind of dialogue with works of the past, and out of this would emerge paintings often drastically different from the alleged models.
Of no small importance in the development of Chinese painting was the constant attendance upon the art by critics, writers, poets and historians, some of whom were painters themselves. Their accounts of the appearance, style and significance of the lost masterpieces preserved them for the artists of later centuries.
Professor Loehr writes beautifully and has constructed a model of critical appreciation - the problems are lucidly presented and elegantly worked out. Part of his reputation lies in his ability to teach people to see paintings, and this rare skill serves to unite solid scholarship and aesthetic pleasure. There is no book to match the scope and detail of this volume, and the 198 illustrations - many of them never before made generally available - contribute in making The Great Painters of China a major advance in the literature of Chinese painting.