James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

6.My Studio Name, Ching Yuan Chai

6. My studio name, Ching Yuan Chai. Asked by Howard:

Ching Yuan Chai. It was Shimada who gave me the studio name, as it was Loehr who gave me my Chinese names (Kao Chü-han etc.). Shujiro explained: the Yuan interchanges with Xuan, the abstruse or mysterious; so it could be either Studio of Someone Looking into the Yuan (as I was for my dissertation) or, more prestigiously, Someone Gazing into the Abstruse. When we bought our first Chinese painting (second really, one at a thrift shop where Dorothy worked in NYC during my Met year there, a would-be Ma Yuan), a picture of bamboo growing from a cliff by an 18th cent. minor painter named (now I've forgotten, but he's in the book), purchased unmounted for $15 or so from Yamazoe on Furumonzen, and had it mounted and a box made, and (! not knowing any better) asked Shujiro for a hakogaki, he didn't refuse, but wrote something very non-committal: "This is one of the Chinese paintings acquired by Ching Yuan Chai in Japan."

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