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.
