James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

As a first item to post on the “Photo Gallery” section of my website, I have chosen to post a collection of color reproductions of “Images of Women in Later Chinese Painting” copied over some years from auction catalogs. For each image, information is provided about where it comes from (which auction company, auction of what date, catalog number of this painting) and  also, for most of them, a few notes by myself about the painting. I copied these for myself, as part of the long-term project “Women in Chinese Painting” (WCP) begun with a seminar around 1990, and taking shape in the Getty Lectures delivered at USC and later in Berkeley and New York (at the Met). These lectures were never properly published, but my Pictures for Use and Pleasure book grew out of the second (about what kinds of artists produced these works) and all of them are accessible, un-illustrated as yet, under “Writings of James Cahill.”

Added note: Although I still have all the albums from which these were taken (most of them now in Berkeley) I am not  offering to follow up on requests by going back to these catalogs to  get more information to send to those who want it. You will have to find copies of the catalogs on your own. Big collections of auction catalogs that I know of are at the Met in New York and in the Art Library at Stanford University. I have collected and posted these images to provide the start of an image library for those working on the big and important topic of how women were portrayed in Chinese painting, and the implications of all those portrayals. I thought at one point of classifying them into types, or categories, such as: Women In  Gardens; Women Tending Children; Women  Taking Roles Usually Taken By Men, Pairs of Women In  Seemingly Erotic Relationships, and the like. But in the end I have left all that for you to do yourselves.

James  Cahill, March 2, 2012