WCP Bibliography

History of Art 192A, Undergrad Seminar in Chinese Ptg, Fall 1993: Portraits and Pictures of Women in Chinese Painting
Bibliography.

I. Women in history, virtuous women etc.

Ayscough, Florence. Chinese Women, Yesterday and Today. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1937. (Includes section on Pan Chao with trans. of her Nü chieh, "Precepts for Women," pp. 228-49).

Chung, Priscilla. Palace Women in the Northern Sung, 960-1126, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1981. (HQ1767 C41 1981)

Lai, Chuhui Judy. The Han Representation of Exemplary Women: Context and Interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, U.C.L.A., 1991. On women in Wu Liang Tz'u and other Han mortuary-shrine engravings.

O'Hara, Albert, S.J. The Position of Woman in early China According to the Lieh Nü Chuan, "The Biographies of Chinese Women." Taipei, 1971. Principally a translation of this text.

II. Position of women in Chinese society.

Bernhardt, Kathryn (UCLA History Dept.), "A Ming-Qing Transition in Chinese Women's History?" Paper for Conference on "Rethinking Chinese Women's History," UCLA, Nov. 13, 1993.

Birge, Bettina (now asst. prof. at U.S.C.), "Women and Property in Sung Dynasty China (960-1279): Neo-Confucianism and Social Change in Chien-chou, Fukien." Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia U., 1992.

Ch'ü, T'ung-tsu. Law and Society in Traditional China. Cambridge? 1959? (check biblio. info., missing from my Taipei reprint). Ch. 2: Marriage (and divorce, concubinage, etc.) More about the legal basis than about actual practice.

Eastman, Lloyd E., Family, Field, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change in China's Social and Economic History, 1550-1949, New York and Oxford, Oxford U. Press, 1988, espec. pp. 19-40: "The Changing Status of Women." Interesting summary, ranging all over the subject.

Ebrey, Patricia, "Women, Marriage, and the Family in Chinese History." In: Paul S. Ropp, ed., Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization. Useful summary. Also, same author: Confucianism and Family Rituals, also other writings.

Ebrey, Patricia. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period. Berkeley, U.C. Press, 1993.

Furth, Charlotte. "Ming-Qing Medicine and the Construction of Gender." Yale Conference, 295-308.

Gates, Hill, "The Commodification of Chinese Women." In Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14.4, Summer 1989, 799-832.

Guisso, Ricard W., and Stanley Johannesen, Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship, Youngstown, N.Y., Philo Press, 1981.

Handlin, Joanna F. "Lü K'un's New Audience: The Influence of Women's Literacy on Sixteenth-Century Thought." In: Wolf & Witke, eds. (see below), 13-38.

Herschatter, Gail: look into her writings. Studied prostitutes, their "fictive families," pseudo-kinship groups w/in houses. Wrote on prostitution in early 20c, and literature of it. In CAA talk, cited Stephen Chen's writing on courtesan novels and who read them (middle/lower class people who had no access to courtesans themselves.) Essay by her in Watson & Ebrey book, see below.

Knapp, Bettina L. Images of Chinese Women: A Westerner's View. Troy, New York, Whitson Pub. Co., 1992. (HQ1767 K6 1992) Privately published? Not very fastidious in its scholarship: rather free imagination.

Ko, Dorothy, "Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture in 17th- and 18th-century China." Late Imperial China 13.1, June 1992, 9-39.

-- "Toward a Social History of Women in Seventeenth-Century China." Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford U., 1989.

-- Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford U. Press, 1994.

Lang, Olga, Chinese Family and Society, New Haven, Yale U. Press, 1946; reprint, Taipei, 1985. Ch. IV, "Love, Marriage, Divorce." Ch. V, "Women in the Family and Society of Old China."

Li, Yu-ning, ed. Chinese Women through Chinese Eyes. New York and London, M. E. Sharpe, 1992. (HQ1767 C454 1992) Useful collection of essays, mostly trans. from Chinese.

Lin, Yutang, Widow, Nun, and Courtesan. New York, J. Day Co., 1951. PL3277 E8L5. See also his "Feminist Thought in Ancient China," T'ien Hsia Monthly 1/2, Sept. 1935; reprinted in Li Yu-ning collection (see above) pp. 34-58.

Mann, Susan (U.C. Davis). "Grooming a Daughter for Marriage: Brides and Wives in the Mid-Ch'ing Period." In: Watson and Ebrey, eds., Marriage and Inequality, 204-230.

-- "'Fuxue' (Women's Learning) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801): China's First History of Women's Culture." Late Imperial China 13/1, June 1992, 40-62.

-- "The Feminist Turn in Confucian History." Paper for Conference on "Rethinking Chinese Women's History," UCLA, Nov. 13, 1993.

-- Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford U. Press, 1997.

(Note: Mann gave lecture at UCB, Sept. 18, 1992 on "Courtesans in Context: The 18th Century." Has she published on this? )

McDermott, Joseph P., "The Chinese Domestic Bursar." In Masayoshi Uozumi, ed., Tradition and Modernization: Essays in Honour of the 70th Birthday of Professor Kyoko Takeda Cho, special issue of Ajiya Bunka, 1990. On women's control of family finances.

Pruitt, Ida. A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman. Yale U. Press, 1945; reprint, Stanford U. Press, 1967. A kind of autobiography, told through Pruitt, of Ning Lao T'ai-tai, 1867-after 1938.

-- Old Madam Yin: A Memoir of Peking Life, 1926-1938. Stanford U. Press, 1967.

Ropp, Paul S. "The Seeds of Change: Reflections on the Condition of Women in the Early and Mid Ch'ing." In Signs 2.1, Autumn 1976, 5-23.

Rowe, William T. "Women and the Family in Mid-Qing Social Thought: The Case of Chen Hongmou." Late Imperial China 13.2, Dec. 1992, 1-41.

Tu, Wei-ming, "On Neo-Confucianism and Human-relatedness." In: George A. De Vos and Takao Sufue, ed., Religion and the Family in East Asia, pp. 111-125. (In: Senri Ethnological Studies 11, 1984?) Xerox. On position of women in Chinese family.

Watson, Rubie S., and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, ed., Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, Berkeley, U.C. Press, 1991. Includes: Rubie S. Watson, "Wives, Concubines, and Maids: Servitude and Kinship in the Hong Kong Region, 1900-1940"; Gail Hershatter, "Prostitution and the Market in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai."

Wolf, Margery, and Roxane Witke, Women in Chinese Society. Stanford U. Press, 1975. Conference volume, ten papers.

(Ref. from others--unknown to me--look up: Katie Curtin, Women in China, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1975. Emily Ahern, "Power and Pollution of Chinese Women," in Arthur Wolf, ed., Studies in Chinese Society, Stanford, 1978, pp. 269-90.)

III. Prostitution, courtesans, concubines, etc.

Chou, Eric. The Dragon and the Phoenix: Love, Sex, and the Chinese. London, Michael Joseph, 1971. Entertaining, full of information; unfortunately, few citations of sources, sloppy. Use with caution.

des Rotours, Robert, Courtisanes chinoises a la fin des T'ang, entre circa 789 et le 8 janvier 881 ( trans. of Pei-li chih or "Anecdotes of the Northern Quarter" by Sun Ch'i, preface 884.

Gronewold, Sue, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China, 1860-1936. New York, 1985.

(Writings of Gail Hershatter, see above.)

Henriot, Christian. La prostitution a Shanghai aux XIXe-XXe siecles (1849-1958). Doctoral thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris? 1992. 2 vols. (Copy belonging to Fred Wakeman.)

Jaschok, Marie, Concubines and Bondservants: A Social History, Hong Kong, Oxford U. Press, 1988. About concubinage in recent & present times, based on actual cases. (HQ281 J371 1988)

Levy, Howard S. "The Gay Quarters of Ch'ang-an," in: Orient/West 7/9-10, 1962; 8/6, 1963; 9/1, 1964.

---, trans., A Feast of Mist and Flowers: The Gay Quarters of Nanking at the End of the Ming. Yokohama, 1966. Trans. of Yü Huai, "Diverse Records of Wooden Bridge."

--- Harem Favorites of an Illustrious Celestial. Taichung, 1958. On T'ang empresses and imperial consorts, incl. Yang Kuei-fei. DS734 L48.

---, trans. Warm-soft Village: Chinese Stories, Sketches and Essays. Tokyo, 1964. (In this he refers, p. 100, to another book of his titled the Illusory Flame, Tokyo, Kenkyusha, 1962. Find?) (Also, Richard F. S. Yang and Howard S. Levy, trans., Monks and Nuns in a Sea of Sin, Washington, D.C., 1971.)

Mao Hsiang (Mao P'i-chiang), Ying-mei-an i-yü (Reminiscences of the Convent of the Shadowy Plum Blossoms), trans. by Pan Tze-yen as The Reminiscences of Tung Hsiao-wan. Shanghai, Commercial Press, 1931. (714 M296.)

Peterson, Willard. Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change. New Haven, Yale U. Press, 1979. Brief section, pp. 141-45, on Fang and a friend enjoying the Ch'in-Huai quarter in Nanjing.

Waley, Arthur, "The Green Bower Collection." Part I: Oriental Art n.s. III/2, Summer 1957, pp. 50-54; Part II: ibid. III/3, Autumn 1957, 107-110. Trans. of sections of Yüan-period Ch'ing-lou chi, notes on careers of singing girls & actresses, with commentary.

Wolfe, Bernard, "A Chinese Courtesan's Dictionary." (Reprod. from typescript, no date.)

(Note also that John Blofeld, City of Lingering Splendour: A Frank Account of Old Peking's Exotic Pleasures, has much on lives of prostitutes there, how they entertained customers, etc., from consumer's point of view.)

IV. Sex in China, erotic pictures, etc.

(Note: this list can be supplemented with: Eugene C. Burt, Erotic Art: An Annotated Bibliography with Essays, Boston, 1989 (N8217 E6 A12 B871 1989.)

Beurdeley, Michel, with Kristofer Schipper, Chang Fu-jui, and Jacques Pimpaneau, Chinese Erotic Art. Rutland, VT and Tokyo, 1969. Orig. pub. as: The Clouds and the Rain: The Art of Love in China. (EAL fNX650 E7 J483 1969)

Bodde, Dirk. "Sex in Chinese Civilization." In: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 129, pp. 161-72. Reprinted, with changes, in his Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-modern China. Honolulu, U. Hawaii Press, 1991. Pp. 270-284: "The Question of Sex."

Byron, John. Portrait of a Chinese Paradise: Erotica and Sexual Customs of the Late Qing Period. London, Quartet Books,1987. Shallow text, aesthetically low-level objects.

Chang, John? Jolan? see under Pampaneau below.

Étiemble. Yun Yu: An Essay on Eroticism and Love in Ancient China, trans. James Haworth. Geneva, Nagel, 1970. (EAL fNX650 E7 E814)

Furth, Charlotte. "Androgenous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in 16th and 17th-Century China. Late Imperial China 9.2, Dec. 1988, 1-31.

Gichner, Lawrence E., Erotic Aspects of Chinese Culture. Washington, D.C., 1957. Pp. 86-113: English trans. of passages in Latin in Edgerton trans. of Chin-p'ing mei.

Humana, Charles, and Wang Wu. The Chinese Way of Love. Hong Kong, CFW Publications,1982. A hodge-podge, but with interesting things in it.

Montagnac, Brigitte de. "Iconographie des 'Images du Printemps'" In: Revue d'Histoire des Arts 11, 1988, 31-40.

Needham, Joseph, ed. Science and Civilization in China, V/5, on "Physiological Alchemy," 184-218: on sexuality as one aspect of this.

Pampaneau, Jacques (Jolan Chang). The Tao of Love and Sex: The Ancient Chinese Way to Ecstasy. Forward and postscript by Joseph Needham. New York, Dutton, 1977. (HQ18 C6. Missing from UC library)

Ruan, Fang Fu, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture. New York, 1991.

Rawson, Philip, Erotic Art of the East: The Sexual Theme in Oriental Painting and Sculpture. New York, 1968. Ch. 7-8: China.

(Shen Te-fu essays mentioned by Joanna Handlin, n.12, in book pub. 1619: find.)

van Gulik, R. H. Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period. Three volumes. Tokyo, privately printed (50 copies! one in Bancroft), 1951; reprint, Taipei, 198? Note that the series of pictures reproduced as pl. 13-20 in the first volume is almost certainly a fabrication made by van Gulik himself (recognizably in the same style as his illustrations to the Judge Dee mysteries.) Not reliable as evidence for late Ming sexual practice or the representation of it!

van Gulik, R. H. Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from Circa 1500 B.C. to 1644 A.D. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1961, 1974. See very critical review by Edward H. Schafer in Journal of the American Oriental Society 81/4, 1961, 452-54.

Wang, N. S., and B. I. Wang, trans. The Fragrant Flower: Classic Chinese Erotica in Art and Poetry (Hua Ying Jin Zhen). New York, Prometheus Books, 1990. Reprints one of the late Ming erotic albums pub. by van Gulik (see above), one of the genuine ones, not v.G.'s fabrication; translates poems. Lightweight. In Morrison Library (!)

West, Stephen H., and Wilt L. Idema, trans., The Moon and the Zither: The Story of the Western Wing. Trans. of play by Wang Shih-fu, 15th cent. Pp. 77-153, "An Introduction to the World of the Western Wing," on love affairs etc. in Ming China & its literature; includes (pp. 151-52) useful list of erotic images and symbols. Also useful: Appendix III, by Yao Dajuin, "The Pleasure of Reading Drama: Illustrations to the Hongzhi Edition of The Story of the Western Wing," pp. 437-468.

Wile, Douglas. Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics, including Women's Solo Meditation Texts. Albany, State U. of New York Press, 1992.

Zheng, Chantal. "La decouverte de l'erotisme a la Chinoise." La Recherche 17, no. 178 (June 1986): 848-49. Nude sculptures from Han tomb. (Haven't seen)

V. Representations of Women in Chinese Painting

Cahill, James, "The Real Mme. Ho-tung." Lecture given at Fogg Murseum, November 1978; repeated in various forms afterwards. Also notes for lecture on "Pictures and Portraits of Women in Chinese Painting" delivered in several places in China in 1988.

Chuang Po-ho, "Female Beauties in Soochow New Year Prints," in Collector's Show of Traditional Soochow Woodblock Prints in Taiwan, R.O.C., Taipei, 1987, pp. 40-44 (Chinese text, w. illust.), 312-317 (English trans.) Good/bad example of unfocused, uncritical treatment of this subject in most Chinese writings.

Hay, John, "The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?" In: Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, ed., Body, Subject, and Power in China, Chicago, 1994, 42-77.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. "Amorous Beauty or Aloof Nymph: A Study of Ch'iu Ying's Beauty in Spring Thoughts. Unpub. paper for CAA session? July 1986.

-- "Notes on Ladies Wearing Flowers in Their Hair. Orientations 21/2, Feb. 1990, pp. 32-39. (On Liaoning Museum ptg. attrib. to Chou Fang.)

-- "Chinese Palace-Style Poetry and the Depiction of A Palace Beauty. In Art Bulletin 72/2, June 1990, pp. 284-295.

Lin Xiaoping, "Women and the Moon in Southern Sung Album Leaves." Seminar paper, Yale U., 1988.

Maeda, Robert, "The Portrait of a Woman of the Late Ming-Early Ch'ing Period: Madame Ho-tung." Archives of Asian Art XXVII, 1973-74, pp. 46-52.

-- "Some Sung, Chin, and Yüan Representations of Actors." Artibus Asiae XLI, 1979, 1320156. A few notes--not much--on actresses.

Murray, Julia. "The Nü hsiao ching and Sung Textual Illustration: Problems of reconstruction and artistic context." Ars Orientalis XVIII, 19 . pp. 95-129.

-- "Women's Social Roles as Reflected in Chinese Paintings." Draft paper, lecture? unpublished. Simple taxonomic approach.

Shan Guoqiang (Palace Mus., Beijing). "Ku-tai shih-nü-hua so-t'an" (Random Notes on Ancient Paintings of Beautiful Women), in Ku-kung po-wu-yüan yüan-k'an (Palace Museum Journal), 1981 no. 2, pp. 44-48. More or less the same? in his "Preface" to Li-tai shih-nü-hua hsüan (see below under reprod. books.)

Vinograd, Richard, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits 1600-1900, Cambridge and New York, 1992, pp. 95-97: brief passage on two portraits of women.

Wang Yao-t'ing, trans. by Deborah A. Sommer. "Images of the Heart: Chinese Paintings on a Theme of Love." Part I: National Palace Museum Bulletin v. XXII no. 5, Nov.-Dec. 1987, pp. 1-21; Part II: ibid. v. XXII no. 6, Jan.-Feb. 1988, pp. 1-21.

Wappenschmidt, Friederike Gabriele. Das Bild der Schönen Frau in der Chinesischen Malerei. Dissertation, Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 1978.

Weidner, Marsha. "In Her Studio: Late Ming and Qing-Dynasty Images of Female Writers and Artists." Paper for CAA session on "Genres in Chinese Painting," Houston, 19 .

Also: student papers from lecture courses, not without value:
-Bernadette Bell, "Life in the Palace: T'ang Dynasty Court Ladies in Paintings attributed to Chou Fang." Term paper, 1979.
- Jane Ginsky, "Reality and Fiction in T'ang Court Lady Paintings." Term paper, 1991.
- Hilary Lade, "Illustrations to the Theme of Cai Wenji." Term paper, 1982.
- Susan Teicholz, "The 'Ladies with Flowered Headdresses' Handscroll," term paper, n.d.
Lawrence Wu, "T'ang Figure Painting of Women." Term paper, n.d. A few useful literary references.

VI. Women in Chinese Literature; love poetry.

Birrell, Ann, trans., Yü-t'ai hsin-yung (New Songs from a Jade Terrace): An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry. London, Allen & Unwin, 1982. Paperback reprint, Penguin, 1986. "Poems about palace ladies, courtesans, deserted wives, and separated lovers" (James Liu review in JAS) Trans. of anthology of love poetry compiled around 545 by court poet Hsü Ling, with poems from 2nd cent. B.C. to time of compilation. Notes at back give much info. on erotic imagery. PL2518 N48.

-- "The Dusty Mirror: Courtly Portraits of Woman in Southern Dynasties Love Poetry." In: Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney, eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, New York, Columbia U. Press, 1985, 33-69.

Cahill, Suzanne, "Sex and the Supernatural in Medieval China: Cantos on the Transcendent Who Presides Over the River." Journal of the American Oriental Society 105.2, 1985, pp. 197-220.

Chang, Chun-shu, and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang. Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yü's World. Ann Arbor, U. Mich. Press, 1992. Espec. pp. 67-70, 206-213, plus notes: on women in Li Yü's life and writings. Idealizes Li Yü somewhat, but interesting, useful.

Chang, Kang-i Sun, The Late-Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung: Crises of Love and Loyalism. New Haven and London, Yale U. Press, 1991. I:2: "The Concept of Ch'ing and Late-Ming Images of Women." Good discussion of romantic love in late Ming, its expressions in literature. I:3: "Ch'en Tzu-lung and the Woman Poet Liu Shih." II.4: "Tz'u Songs of Passion." All very good-read.

--- : "The Device of the Mask in the Poetry of Wu Wei-yeh (1609-1671)." In: Willard J. Peterson et. al., eds., The Power of Culture: Studies in Chinese Cultural History, Hong kong, The Chinese University Press, 1994, pp. 246-274. Long section on the late Ming courtesan-poet Pien Yü-ching.

Edwards, Louise. "Representations of Women and Social Power in Eighteenth-century China: The Case of Wang Xifeng." In: Late Imperial China 14/1, June 1993, pp. 34-59.

Fusek, Lois, trans. Among the Flowers: The Hua-chien chi. New York, Columbia U. Press, 1982. A mid-10th cent. anthology of love poetry in tz'u form.

Hessney, Richard. "Beyond Beauty and Talent: The Moral and Chivalric Self in The Fortunate Union." In: Hegel & Hessney, eds. (see above), pp. 214-250.

Levenson, Christopher, trans. The Golden Casket: Chinese Novellas of Two Millenia. From the German of Wolfgang Bauer and Herbert Franke. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1964.

Ma, Y. W., and Joseph S. M. Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations. New York, Columbia U. Press, 1978. Lots of love stories etc. Intreresting: "The Oil Peddler Courts the Courtesan," from Feng Meng-lung's Hsing-shih heng-yen, 1620s; woman who became courtesan, advice on ways of leaving profession, etc.

McMahon, Keith, "The Classic 'Beauty-Scholar' Romance and the Superiority of the Talented Woman." In: Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, and Power in China, Chicago, 1994, pp. 227-252.

- - Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-century Chinese Fiction. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1995.

McLaren, Anne E., trans. The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period. Sydney, Australia, U. of Sydney (East Asia Series #8), 1994.

Owen, Stephen. Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire. Cambridge, Harvard U. Press, 1989. On erotic and love poetry, Chinese and western. Meditative.

Swatek, Catherine. "Images of Women and Their Men in Two Plays by Tang Xianzu." Yale Conference, 225-246.

Wagner, Marsha L., "Maids and Servants in Dream of the Red Chamber: Individuality and the Social Order." In: Hegel & Hessney, eds. (see above). pp. 251-281.

Wu, Yenna, "Proto-feminist Thought in Ming-Qing Fiction." Yale Conference, 269-287.

Yu, Anthony, "Literature and the Conflict of Desire in The Story of the Stone.." Yale Conference, 126-175. On reading of erotic book by Bao Yü & Lin Dai-yü in Hong-lou Meng. Also pornographic picture discovered in Ta-yüan Garden.

Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford, 1993. Ch. 4: "Dislocations in Gender."

-- "Embodying the Disembodied: Representations of Ghosts and the Feminine in 17th-Century Chinese Literature." Yale Conference 1-17.

(Also good: brief section on "Women in Traditional Chinese Literature" in Yi-tsi Feuerwerker's "Women as Writers in the 1920s and 1930s," in Wolf, & Witke, eds., Women in Ch. Society, pp. 146-55.)

Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature vol. I (New York, Grove Press, 1965) pp. 290-322, gives trans. of two classic T'ang-period love stories: Yüan Chen, "The Story of Ts'ui Ying-ying" (basis of Hsi-hsiang chi later); Po Hsing-chien, "The Story of Miss Li."

VII. Women painters

Hagman, Lorrie. "Ladies of the Jade Studio: Women Artists of China." In: Peterson, Karen, and J. J. Wilson, Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal: from the early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. 1976. Appendix, pp. 144-203.

Hsü, Pang-ta (Xu Bangda), "Women Painters' Works in the Palace Museum." Chinese Literature 1959 no. 7, 163-67.

Laing, Ellen. "Wives, Daughters, and Lovers: Three Ming Dynasty Women Painters." In: Marsha Weidner, ed., Views from Jade Terrace, 31-39.

Li, Shih, "Kuei-ko chung ti t'ien-ts'ai" (Genius in the Women's Quarters.) Ku-kung po-wu-yüan yüan-k'an (Palace Museum Journal), 1990 no. 3, 92-95. On Wen Shu and Ch'iu Chu (or Ch'iu Shih). Also two others. (Note: Li Shih also organized an exhibition of works of women painters in the Palace Museum in the same year; no catalog.)

T'ang Sou-yü, Yü-t'ai hua-shih (Jade Terrace History of Painting.) 19th century. The basic Chinese source for information on Chinese women painters; see my Liu Yin article pp. 104-05 and note 6.

Tseng, Yu-ho, "Hsüeh Wu and Her Orchids in the Collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts." Arts Asiatiques II/3, 1955, pp. 197-208. Pioneering, still interesting.

-- "Women Painters of the Ming Dynasty." In Artibus Asiae LIII/1-2, 1993, 249-261. English version of unpublished paper presented in Chinese at "Symposium on Painting of the Ming Dynasty," Art Gallery, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 30 Nov.-2 Dec., 1988. On Ma Shou-chen (15448-ca. 1605), Hsüeh Wu (1564-ca. 1673), Wen Shu (1595-1634), and Liu Yin (1610-1685.)

Weidner, Marsha, "Ladies of the Lake: The Seventeenth Century Landscape Painters Lin Hsüeh, Yang Hui-lin, and Huang Yüan-chieh." Draft paper: do not cite.

Weidner, Marsha, et. al. Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists, 1300-1912. Catalog of an exhibition. Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988. Includes useful essays by Marsha, Ellen Laing, Irving Lo. Pp. 176-87: "Index of Extant and Reproduced Paintings by Women."

Weidner, Marsha, ed. Flowering in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting. Honolulu, U. of Hawaii Press, 1990. Essays include: Julia Murray on Ladies' Classic of Filial Piety scrolls; Ellen Laing on "Women Painters in Traditional China"; Cahill on "The Painting of Liu Yin"; Weidner on the painter Ch'en Shu.

(Note: Ayscough, Chinese Women, includes sections on the calligrapher Wei Fu-jen, pp. 198-202, and the painters Kuan Tao-sheng, 202-210, and Ma Ch'üan, 210-213.)

VIII. Women poets, women writers

Furth, Charlotte, and James Lee, eds. Symposium on Poetry and Women's Culture in Late Imperial China. In: Late Imperial China 13.1, June 1992 (special issue.) Papers delivered at symposium at UCLA, October 1990. Includes:
- Dorothy Ko, "Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture in 17th- and 18th-Century China."
- Susan Mann, "'Fuxue' (Women's Learning) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801): China's First History of Women's Culture."
- Maureen Robertson, "Voicing the Feminine: Constructions of the Gendered Subject in Lyric Poetry by Women of Medieval and Late Imperial China." (Note long & useful footnote on concept of "negotiation," p. 65. )
- Ellen Widmer, "Xiaoqing's Literary Legacy and the Place of the Woman Writer in Late Imperial China."
- Marie Florine Bruneau, "Learned and Literary Women in Late Imperial China and Early Modern Europe."

Gerstlacher, Anna, et. al., eds. Woman and Literature in China. Bochum, Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1985. (From Marsha's biblio. in Jade Terrace; haven't seen.)

Hu, Pin-ching, Li Ch'ing-chao. New York, 1966.

Lo, Irving Yucheng. "Daughters of the Muses of China." In: Marsha Weidner, ed., Views from the Jade Terrace. Brief, interesting essay on women poets in China.

Rexroth, Kenneth, and Ling Chung, trans. and ed., Women Poets of China. New York, 1972. (An anthology; previously published as Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China.)

-- Li Ch'ing-chao: Complete Poems. New York, 1979. (See also long section on her in Ayscough, Chinese Women, pp. 178-195.)

Robertson, Maureen, "Voicing the Feminine: Constructions of the Gendered Subject in Lyric Poetry by Women of Medieval and Late Imperial China." Late Imperial China 13/1, June 1992, 63-110.

(Maureen Robertson, U. of Iowa: met at AAS mtgs, L.A., March 1993, said she is writing book on women writers in Ming-Ch'ing; some were also painters.)

Saussy, Haun. "Women's Writing Before and Within the Hong lou meng." Yale symposium, 115-125.

Widmer, Ellen, "The Epistolatory World of Female Talent in 17th century China," Late Imperial China 10.2, 1989, 1-43. Letters written by women, as preserved in three 17th cent. anthologies. Some stuff on women painters, and on Yüan Mei and his woman pupils.

IX. Miscellaneous

Chow, Rey, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis, U. of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Eberhard, Wolfram. Guilt and Sin in Traditional China. Berkeley, U.C. Press, 1967 (BJ117 E2)

Hinsch, Bret, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China. Berkeley, U.C. Press, 1990.

Levy, Howard. Chinese Footbinding: the History of a Curious Erotic Custom. New York, w. Rawls, 1966. (Anthro. GN161 L4)

Wakeman, Frederic, "Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs in Seventeenth-century China," in Journal of Asian Studies 43/4, August 1984, pp. 631-665. Deals with, among other things, romantic liaisons between late Ming-early Ch'ing scholar-officials and courtesans.

Yü, Chün-fang, "Images of Kuan-yin in Ming-Ch'ing Popular Literature." Yale Conference, 212-224.

X. Relevant? readings in writings on western art, feminist art history, etc.

(On body & gender issues in medieval-renaissance art: bibliography for Christelle Baskins's spring 1993 course)

Broude, Norma, and Mary D. Garrard, ed., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. New York, Harper Collins, 1993?

Bryson, Norman, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix. Cambridge, England, and New York, Cambridge U. Press, 1984. Ch. 5: "Vision and Desire."

Clayson, Hollis, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era. New Haven, Yale U. Press, 1993?

Cropper, Elizabeth, "The Beauty of Women: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture." In: Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Chicago, 1986, pp. 175-190.

Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton, Princeton U. Press, 1984. Ch. 2, "Olympia's Choice."

Hagan, Tracy, "Drawn By Desire: a Study of the Female Image in Modern Art History." In: John Deely and Terry Prewitt, ed., Semiotics 1991: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, ? Maryland, 1992.

(Lynn Lawner, draft essay: "A Few Words about Courtesans in Renaissance Culture." Ms. Deals with "I modi" by Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi, with sonnets by Pietro Aretino. Also: Lynn Lawner, ed. & trans., I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance. Evanston, U. of Illinois Press, 1988.

Nochlin, Linda. "Women, Art, and Power." In: Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, ed., Visual Theory: Painting & Interpretation, New York, HarperCollins, 1991, pp. 13-46. (Two shorter responses to it follow.)

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge and London, Harvard U. Press, 1990.

XI. Reproduction books, Printed Picture Books

Palace Museum, Beijing. Li-tai shih-nü hua hsüan-chi (Selected Paintings of Female Figures Through the Ages from the Collection of the Palace Museum.) Tientsin, People's Art Pub. Co., 1981. Based on an exhibition. Abbrev. as Shih-nü.

National Palace Museum, Taipei. Shih-nü hua chih mei (Glimpses into the Hidden Quarters: Paintings of Women from the Middle Kingdom). Taipei, National Palace Museum, 1988.

Nanjing Museum. Ming Ch'ing jen-wu hsiao-hsiang hua-hsüan (Portrait Paintings of the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties), Shanghai, People's Art Pub. Co., 1982. English text. 22-23: portrait of the courtesan K'ou Pai-men, by Fan Ch'i and Wu Hung, 1650. 34-37: "Enjoying Ladies' Entertainment" by Yü Chih-ting. 52: Portrait of Mme. Han. 53: Portrait of Ku Mei (? how identified?). 71: "Portrait" of a lady by Fei Tan-hsü. (Lin Tai-yü sweeping petals?) 73: Lady by Jen Hsiung. 82-83: Portrait of Yang Chio-hsien, by Jen Po-nien + portraitist. Abbrev. as Nanjing Portraits.

(Ku-kung Po-wu-yüan ts'ang) Ch'ing-tai kung-t'ing hui-hua (The Collection of the Palace Museum: Court Painting of the Qing Dynasty.) Beijing, Cultural Relics Pub. House, 1992. Abbrev. as Court Ptg.

Lieh-nü chuan (Biog. of Eminent Women), late Ming edition; preface of 1799 says edited by Wang Tao-k'un (1525-93), illustrated by Ch'iu Ying (d. ca. 1552). Both doubtful. See Carliltz, "Women, Money, Virtue" pp. 18-19; discussed also in her "Social Uses." Recent facsimile reprint.

Ku Chien-lung? Ch'ing-kung chen-pao) Pi-mei t'u ("Two Hundred Beauties Pictures," illus. to Chin-p'ing Mei, "The Plum in the Golden Vase." Commissioned by? K'ang-hsi Emperor or someone in court?, kept in imperial court, Ch'ien-lung imperial seals. Pub. in 1940s?, recent reprint, 2 vols. (Eight leaves now in Nelson Gal.,K.C.; 17 in col. of Andrew Franklin, London. Rest was in col. of Chang Hsüeh-liang, Taipei; where now?)

XII. Paintings not to miss:

- K'ang T'ao portrait in Kuang-tung hsing pl. 218: looks interesting.

- Wu Wei's 1503 ptg. of Li Nu-nu dancing & singing to entertain guests at age 10, insc. by T'ang Yin & others. Quanji VI/121.

- Portrait of Tung Chi (Courtesan Tung) by Ch'ien Ku, insc. by Hsiang Sheng-mo & others. Quanji VII/136. Fine!

- First surviving portrait of woman is of course Ma-wang-tui #1 banner. But see Wu Hung, Early China 17, 122, on this.

- The "Twelve Concubines of Yung-cheng Emperor" series. Reprod. as calendar, etc. See Huang Miao-tzu in Forbidden City 20, 1983.4, on these. But: article by Chu Chia-chin in ibid. 34, 1986/3, p. 45 identifies them properly as panels in decorative screen.

-British Museum "Portrait of a Lady": has Leng Mei seals. Suzuki Archive E15-041. See Maeda article fn. 32 for ref.

- Lo P'ing portrait of Su Hsiao-hsiao, 1781, Lin Po-shou col., Taipei. See Lan-ch'ien shan-kuan 29, 20 (?)

- Anon. "Eight Beauties on Hibiscus Terrace." (Said to be concubines of T'ang Yin!) Hong Kong, Horstmann & Godfrey, Ltd. Reprod. Artist is a certain Hua Hsüan.

- Series of illustrations to the novel Chin-p'ing mei, early 18c? Reprod. in 2 vols.; eight of them in Nelson-Atkins Museum, K.C. Some overtly erotic. Were "Property of Andrew Franklin, C.V.O., C.B.E., former British China Consular Service" (Sotheby's auction cat., June 2, 1987, #80: fourteen more leaves sold then. 13-1/4 x 12-1/2" (39.6 x 31.7 cm.) Est: $50-70,000.

- Portrait of Tung Hsiao-wan by Yü Chih-ting in Shen-chou kuo-kuang chi 18, with dedication.

- Ch'iu Ying Lieh-nü chuan (Eminent Women) scroll: TSYMC hua-hsüan; same? in T'u-mu VI/18-09. Nanjing U. Ch'ien-lung etc. seals. Genuine? Also one in Freer, see Thomas Lawton, Chinese Figure Painting.no. 9, pp. 58-69.

- Ch'ien Hsüan pictures of Yang Kuei-fei and Ming-huang, see Cahill article in Archives 12, 1958, espec. pp. 20-21. Cf. Levy, Harem Favorites, last section, on Yang Kuei-fei ("Precious Consort Yang") for "iconography" of this, e.g. pp. 148-49, "mounting horse" and "playing flute." Also pictures of Yang Kuei-fei bathing, e.g. Anon. Ming picture in Sô Gen 193.

-Wu Yu-jen (Wu Yu-ju) album of twelve ptgs of women, dtd. 1890: in Masterworks of Shanghai School Painters from Shanghai Museum Collections, Hong Kong, Tai Yip, 1991, no 47. (No. 48 in same: lady in garden with bamboo & banana palm by Hu T'ieh-mei: extreme contrast.) Others in this book: no. 2, Fei Tan-hsü; no. 42, Fei I-keng; no. 50, Jen I (Po-nien), lady painting leaf, cf. Kai Ch'i;

- Albums by 19c artists, figures in gardens etc., with male and female figures (not usually together): my Jen Hsiung; my Jen Hsün; Ni T'ien (Shanghai School Ptrs, see above, no. 82). What differentiates in settings, poses, attributes, etc.?

- Quanji 10 (Ch'ing 2)) 108: portrait of Li Ch'ing-chao! (How do we know?) Also in Shih-nü hua (see above).

- Real (?) portrait of her: by Wang I, Yuan dynasty portraitist, dtd. 1354, copying an original by Ou-yang Hsiao-hsia (who?) dtd. 1114; these survive only in later copies, e.g. one in Palace Mus., Beijing, by Chin Li-ying, dtd. 1800.

- Anon. 18c ptg of lady by rock & banana palm, w. inscription by Yüan Mei: To-yün-hsüan ts'ang-hua hsüan pl. 25.

- T'ao Hung album of ladies, Tumu IV/1-2821, Shanghai: kind of taxonomy of accepted types/roles in early Ch'ing? Others of this kind.

- Another "longing lady" by Huang Chüan, late Ming-early Ch'ing, Fukien artist. Chung-kuo shu-hua 20, 1986/12, pp. 22, 23. Also in TôSô 398.

- Beautiful lady seated on rock, dtd. 1640, by Huang Shih-fu, late Ming Fujian master (YCH p. 1140), in Palace Mus., Beijing (Shih-nü #23). "No.18 in series" acc. to his insc.

WCP1 Illustrations

1/1.C. "Portrait of Mme. Hedong" (Anon. 18c.) Fogg/Sackler. (+)
1/2. Yü Ji, Portrait of Liu Yin. (+)
1/3. Yü Zhiding, Portrait of Liu Yin. Dtd. 1696. (+)
1/4. Anon. 18c., R.O.M. Toronto ptg. (+)
1/5.C. Huang Ming, unident. (+)
1/6. Anon. 18th cent. "Portrait of Lady Songfu." From Strehlneek cat., #164. Ink and colors on silk; 5.29 x 3.8 chi. (+)
1/7. "Wakening in Spring, 18th-19th century woodcut, from Gao Wen, ed., New Yrs. Pictures of Mianzhu (?) [Szechwan], pl. 158. B?)
1/8.C Attrib. to Leng Mei, "Portrait of a Lady." British Museum. (+)
1/9.C Detail of same. (H)
1/10. Leng Mei, Tianjin Municipal Art Museum, dtd. 1724 (Tumu X/l115.) (+)
1/11.C Anonymous, follower of Leng Mei. Woman by window (mine) (+)
1/12. Leng Mei (Liaoning, woman at dressing table with maid.)(H)
1/13. Gerald Dou (1613-75). Young Woman Having Her Hair Done. 1667. Rotterdam, MB (what?) Oils on canvas, 75.5 x 58 cm. (H)

1/14.C Anonymous, Utrecht School, 17th century. Lady At Her Toilet. 53-1/4" x 69-1/2". Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Delete
1/15. "Ma Shouzhen self-portrait" (from Ostasiatische ) (H)
1/16.C After Gu Hongzhong, "Han Xicai's Night Banquet." (D)
1/17,C 18.C Details from the same. (D)
1/19.C Anon. 18th century, "Scene from the Story of the West Chamber." Freer Gallery of Art (16.517). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 198.5 cm x 130.6 cm. (H)
1/20.C "Beggar Ying Invites Cinnamon Bud to Drink in Mother Li's 'Willow Garden.'" Leaf from Jin Ping Mei album, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. (H)
1/21.C Fei Danxu. Group Portrait of Yao Xie and His Concubines. Dated 1839. Palace Museum, Beijing. Handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 31 x 128.6 cm. (From: Zhongguo lidai huihua VIII, pl. 80.) (+)
1/22.C Shen Shigeng. Woman picking mulberry leaves. Dated 1642. Tianjin Municipal Museum. Ink & colors on silk, 14" x 27-1/2". (Mary Tregear and Shelagh Vainker, Art Treasures in China, New York, Harry Abrams, 1994, p. 118.) (+)
1/23.C Seals of Yü Zhiding. Woman and Rabbits in Weedgrown Garden. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk. Shanghai Museum. (+)

1/24.C Anonymous, Studio of Yu Zhiding. (Old attribution to Zhou Wenju, Five Dynasties.) Woman Reading in a Garden. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 180.9 x 102.1 cm. National Palace Mus., Taipei (Shinü hua zhi mei, , pl. 4.) (H)
1/25.C Huang Shifu, " Beauty Resting in Seclusion." Dated 1640. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 113.8 x 62.2 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. (Lidai shinü hua xuanji, pl. 23.) (*)
1/26. Anonymous, Woman at a Window. Inscription by ... dated 1696. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on paper. Ching Yüan Chai Collection, Berkeley. (+)
1/27. Anonymous, "Lady with Parokeet, Maid and Child." Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk? From: Shenzhou guoguang ji, vol. 11. (B?)
1/28. Yü Zhiding. "Woman at Weiqi Board." Dated 1697. Hanging scroll (fill in) Tianjin Municipal Museum. From: (Tumu X/0960.) (H)
1/29. Yü Zhiding (1647-1705), "Beauty with Pipa Beneath Banana Tree, in the Manner of Xu Wei." Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 87.5 cm x 35.7 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. (+)
1/30. Anonymous, illustration to Jin Ping Mei (cf. I/20). Collection unknown. Each leaf 39.6 x 31.7 cm. (H)
1/31. Wang Chengpei (? - 1805.) Woman Waiting in a Doorway. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 203 x 112.5 cm. (Christie's auction cat., June '89, #88.) (H)

1/32.C One of "Yongzheng's Consorts" series: one surrounded by antiques on shelves. (+)
1/33.C Jin Tingbiao, Lady Making Up Her Hair. Signed (in lower left). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 222.7 x 130.7 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. (H)
I/34. Jin Tingbiao. Lady Feng Confronting the Bear. (+)

 

Beauty's Face In Later Chinese Painting

The Beauty's Face in Later Chinese Painting

(James Cahill lecture, April 23, 1998, Chicago.)

Intro. Happy to be speaking on eve of symposium. Hope, however, that no one has come in expectation of something really methodologically ambitious, something that aims at laying out issues and state-of-field proposals abt this topic, to be developed in two days that follow. This will be, like my whole approach, somewhat old-fashioned, theoretically low-powered--not at all, in this respect, on level of some, at least, of papers we will be hearing during next two days. In fact, kind of lecture that could almost dispense with words altogether. Old art historians, of generation before mine, for whom style and imagery and visual aspects of work of art were primary objects of concern, were drawn to idea of delivering a wordless lecture (my teacher Max Loehr talked of this): assembling slides, juxtaposing them in right way, letting them and their relationships speak for themselves. Even thinking about such a lecture betrays a faith in power of images to speak for themselves, at least collectively. But unrealizable, in my experience--we always need, in the end, to talk, however superfluously. Please understand, though, that principal attraction of my talk will be great series of slides that I've assembled over some years of working on representations of women in late Ch. ptg. I hope that these, and the few relatively simple things I have to say about them, will serve to point others in fruitful directions for more focused investigations.

SS. (Details from Ch'iu Ying, Ku Hung-chung paintings) One of familiar truths abt Chinese ptgs is that while the faces of men in them are permitted to exhibit particular traits that give the effect, at least, of revealing indiv. character, women's faces are simply depicted according to some type of beauty, and within a given period and school of indiv. style are more or less uniform, indistinguishable. But, like most familiar truths, this one has its limits, isn't universally applicable. The kinds of ptg about which we make this point are works such as these: Ku Hung-chung, Ch'iu Ying,
S -- The faces will of course differ by period, and according to individual style--as Ch'iu Ying's differ from his contemporary T'ang Yin's (his "Beauties of Shu") in ways that any good connoisseur can define. Within a particular period and school and individual style, however, they tend to be more or less uniform. But not always. What I want to do today is explore briefly the exceptions, types of differentiation in depictions of women's faces, concentrating on the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of my current interest. First, I will look briefly into the phenomenon of how the somewhat blurred and permeable line that divides portraits of women from generic pictures of beautiful women permits crossovers, both real and fictional. I will also argue that there is a period from late Ming through mid-18th century or so--which is the period in which most interesting ptgs of women are done, the ones on which my study concentrates--when even the generic depictions of beautiful women, the genre called in Chinese mei-jen hua, exhibit subtle but significant differentiations, nuances that can signify or at least suggest distinctions of mood, situation, social class., and so forth It is true that the social identities and roles of the mei-jen depicted are usually left largely unspecified, so as to leave more room for the construction of male fantasies around them. But mostly they can be thought of as belonging to the broad class of concubines and courtesans, who in this period could be presented in literature and painting as objects of romantic love and sexual desire, as proper wives ordinarily weren't. (Exceptions, of course.) And the possibility of romantic encounters and liaisons is exactly what most of the pictures are meant to conjure up.

S,S. When the period of my main concern is over, that is by late 18th-early 19c, what remains are the familiar winsome, simpering beauties that any traditional Chinese painting specialist or collector will immediately think of if you say shih-nü hua, the all-embracing term for pictures of women. (Fei Tan-hsü 1821, Ku Lo a bit later.) When I tell them I am interested in late-period pictures of beautiful women, I sometimes have to spend the next hour looking at these, without much enthusiasm. This is another category that my talk tonight, like my larger study, will mostly leave out as relatively uninteresting. They are the "respectable" side of beautiful-women painting--decorous, associated with particular name-artists--where the ones I will show are mostly not respectable objects for collecting.

S,S. (Details from Sou-shan t'u scroll). In narrative painting of all periods, the roles and situations of the women may sometimes require that the artist alter their usually impassive expressions, as here in the Sou-shan t'u (Clearing Out the Mountain) scenes in which the demon-women are attacked by fierce birds and beasts. (Details from the late Sung example in the Palace Museum, Beijing.) But these are special cases, exceptions that lie somewhat outside our subject.

S,S. Turning to one of our central problems, the ambiguities or cross-genre slippages that permitted portraits to be read as mei-jen and vice-versa, we can begin by noting several cases in which generic beautiful-woman pictures have been misrepresented as portraits of particular women--the well-known example at the right furnished with an interpolated inscription claiming it as a portrait of Liu Ju-shih, the courtesan-poet of the Ming-Qing transition; the one at left, in the British Museum, cataloged and published as "Portrait of a Lady." These are deceptions fairly easy to detect--the settings and postures and attributes of the figures belong to the conventions of mei-jen, chosen to present them as sexually inviting and accessible, and are quite unsuitable for portraits, even of women who had emerged, as Liu Ju-shih had, from the world of the bordellos. (The setting of the so-called Liu Ju-shih portrait has been cut away, but can be reconstructed from another version of the composition, known through an old publication.) These indicators of accessibility would not have been tolerated, I have argued, in their portraits by the subjects themselves. The pictures have in fact been "upgraded," that is to say falsified, in later times by dealers or other owners to make them more respectable and saleable.

S,S. In a similar way, a set of twelve paintings of beautiful palace ladies in their chambers, done as panels of a screen in the late K'ang-hsi period, were misidentified as portraits of the "Twelve Consorts of the Yung-cheng Emperor" and published and exhibited as that, until their true character was clarified through the discovery of a document revealing their true origin.
S,S. (Faces of "Liu Ju-shih," BM ptg.) I would like to be able to say, then, that distinguishing portraits from pin-ups presents no real problem, if only one understands the codes of signification for the two genres that were familiar to the artists and their audiences. And for these examples, that should be true, I think. But the matter is not so simple. The very fact that the deceptions went undetected for so long testifies, at least, that the codes had been largely forgotten by the time the pictures were transformed, moved from an uncollectible category to a collectible one.
Recent writings by Judith Zeitlin have presented cases in Ming-Ch'ing fiction and drama in which the crossovers between generic beauty and portrait are crucial to the story. (Examples: summarize.) This might sometimes, we can speculate, have been a literary device for praising the woman's beauty: she was so lovely that a true portrait of her was indistinguishable from a beautiful-woman painting. I am inclined to believe, in any case, that for the painters and their immediate clientele, cases of confusion would have been rare and exceptional. When the artist portrays the woman ambiguously, as sometimes happens, it is for a deliberate purpose.
S,S. The face of the woman who appears in the portrait of Ho T'ien-chang by Ch'en Hung-shou, for instance, although she is presumably to be identified as Ho's wife or a favorite concubine, appears to belong to an ideal type rather than to a particular person--this in contrast to the face of Ho T'ien-chang himself, which asserts an individual identity.
S --. The painting attributes to her only a kind of provisional status, seeming to occupy the world of art--again in contrast to his substantial presence and individualized face. As is all too common in works of this kind, the woman is included more as an attribute or possession of his than as a person in her own right, and in representing her this way the artist is in effect complimenting Ho.

S,S. Ch'en Hung-shou, although he presents Ho T'ien-chang's consort here as a pretty face, on another occasion could portray a woman he knew (I do not have the slide here) in a way that recognized her individuality and intelligence. In others of his paintings, moreover, Ch'en Hung-shou regularly sets women in roles that do not subordinate them to men, attributing to them literary, musical, and other talents and according them a measure of instrumentality in their lives. (A fan in the Metropolitan Museum at left, in which the man and his wife listen to the lutenist as equals; his well-known 1638 birthday picture for his aunt in which she is identified with a woman who gave lectures on a certain classical text, delivering an interpretation that had been transmitted only in her family.)
Ch'en is one of several men (the others I think of are the later litterateurs Li Yü and Yüan Mei) who, in this period when women's independent accomplishments are being increasingly recognized but also debated, take an ambivalent stance: on the one hand notorious womanizers, they also exhibit a respect for women's achievements that is rare among their male contemporaries, at least as attested in their preserved writings and recorded behavior.

S,S. (Mme Hotung again; anon. ptg in Met) Even these men who advocated education and freedom for women seem to have continued to hold a fundamental belief that beauty was women's prime attribute, and pleasing men with it their principal function. The early Ch'ing litterateur Li Yü, although he offers in one of his writings the opinion that a woman's beauty derives less from her physical attributes than from her deportment and from an elusive "charm," believed that a light complexion, smooth and unblemished, was of prime importance in a woman's appearance; he cites approvingly a line from the Book of Odes, "Ah, paleness makes for beauty." Next, in Li's opinion, are the eyebrows, which must be gracefully curved, and the eyes, which must be clear, with a steady gaze. After these come the hands and feet. Literary conventions for describing beautiful women offer endlessly-repeated similes: hair like clouds, eyebrows like moth antennae or distant mountains, a mouth like a cherry, flesh like snow or white jade, and so forth. The woman is characterized in terms that tend to emphasize transitory loveliness: she is like the willow beneath a spring moon, or a lotus rising from the water.

S,S. Yüan Mei, like Li Yü, admired and actively supported the engagement of women in literary composition, and had many gentry women writers among his friends and students. His practice of giving some of them poetry lessons in his Sui-yüan Garden in Yangchou, instead of in their homes, was considered scandalous by strict Confucianists such as Chang Hsüeh-ch'eng, for whom a literary (instead of a properly classical) education for them was already an affront to traditional morality. A handscroll painting portraying a gathering that Yüan Mei and a group of woman poets held at the West Lake in Hangchou in 1792 allows us to visualize, although the place is different, the gatherings in the Sui-yüan Garden, idealized and overlaid with literary and pictorial resonances.
-- S (another section) The composition evokes such precedents as the "Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden," in which the eleventh-century Su Tung-p'o and his friends are seen practicing painting and calligraphy, and the "Orchid Pavilion Gathering" in which the calligrapher Wang Hsi-chih, seated in a pavilion at one end of the scroll, writes a preface to the poems composed by the other participants. Here it is Yüan Mei, at the age of 76, who sits in the pavilion with paper before him and brush in hand; the women engage in such long-established literati pursuits as fishing, painting a branch of blossoming plum, playing the zither and the flute, inscribing a banana-palm leaf, and leaning on a stalk of bamboo. The two minor artists who collaborated on the scroll, a portraitist and a landscapist, differentiate the figures only a little by age and facial type, although they are intended as portraits of particular literary women.

S -- (a distorted detail of a painting we'll consider later.) Like Li Yü, Yüan Mei saw women ultimately as sexual objects and had his own strong beliefs about criteria for choosing among them; also like Li Yü, he placed a good complexion uppermost among these. He may have shared in principle the belief that "beauty is only skin-deep," but in moments of decision he goes for great skin. Criticizing a man who had rejected a concubine because her feet were too big, he pronounces loftily that men who are really "enlightened in sexual matters . . . know that a girl's face, eyes, and skin complexion are far more important than the size of her feet." Moreover, he carries that preference, presented there as a universal aesthetic judgement, into the particulars of his own life. In 1748 he went to inspect a young girl whom a fellow-official had offered him as a concubine. "She was eighteen and had a very good figure," he writes. "She let me look her up and down, draw back her dress and lift the hair from her temples without seeming to resent it in the least. I had half a mind to take her. But her complexion was not quite up to the mark, and I gave up the idea." In 1754 he rejected another girl, who had been taken into his household on the assumption that she would become his concubine, because she had caught smallpox and was pock-marked; he gave her instead to a Mongol general, whose may have been less fastidious in his tastes.

-- S. How Yüan himself looked--somewhat later in his life, to be sure, and portrayed with a strong element of caricature--is revealed in the famous 1781 portrait by Lo P'ing. This is the man for whom the two young women lost their chances of becoming concubines through having less-than-perfect complexions. Blemishes in physical appearance could be tolerated in a man, but not in a woman, especially a woman who was to become one's property; one would not acquire a painting with mildew spots, or a ceramic vase with a badly stained or pitted surface.

S -- In 1790, when Yüan Mei was 75 (by Chinese count), a certain Sung-p'o asked him, on their initial meeting, to compose an inscription for an anonymous mei-jen or beautiful-woman picture. Sung-p'o may have been a newly-rich Yangchou merchant too unsophisticated to know that eminent literati were not ordinarily asked to inscribe such low-class paintings. Yüan, presumably after accepting some gift that obligated him to the man, dashed off a quatrain spontaneously, ending with the line "We don't know what man she is thinking of in her heart." And he concludes his prose note by saying that if the beauty could read his inscription, it would add to her artful smile. Imaginary though the woman may be, Yüan's urge is still to engage himself somehow with her, to be the imagined lover in her thoughts. Like other beauties in mei-jen paintings, she conforms with Yüan's ideal in the unnatural whiteness of her face and breast, presumably achieved by the application of cosmetics (her exposed hand is a more natural color.) The woman's face: reveals a slight inwardness, a bit dreamy. We are to understand, of course, as always in such pictures, that she is dreaming of her lover, awaiting his coming... (etc. Flower on banana tree.) The picture belongs, then, to the category of meiren or beautiful woman paintings.

S,S. A few more instances of portraiture, and quasi-portraiture, before we return to the generic meiren. By "quasi-portraiture" I mean to designate imaginary portraits of women of the past, a category that appears, understandably, to occupy a midway position between real portraits from life and the generic pictures of beautiful women, neither so individualized as the former nor so absorbed into a type as the latter. Good examples are the two surviving portraits of the Sung-period poet Li Ch'ing-chao painted by Ts'ui Hui, an artist active in the north in the early 18th century who is taking on an unexpected importance in my study, because of the quality and distinctiveness of his work. Both are in the Palace Museum, Beijing. The smaller of the two portrays her reclining on a rock, as a male poet might do in a painting, looking out at the viewer interestedly but not invitingly. The image has some resemblance, not unexpectedly, to a sub-type within the meiren genre, the literary woman as pin-up (the British Museum picture shown earlier is a good example.)
S,S. But the other, much more interesting depiction of Li Ch'ing-chao by Ts'ui Hui is a hanging scroll that bears only his seals. She is represented in her study, standing, pulling back the chair, welcoming a guest who, we assume, is a fellow poet, whether male or female. Nothing here suggests sexual invitation. The face is that of a poised, self-sufficient person; a touch of concern is expressed in the slanting eyebrows and piercing eyes. In such a picture as this, as in certain real portraits we will see, the artist adapts the formula of the "beauty's face" as it was current in his particular time and school to the needs of representing a subject for which the formulaic face would be inappropriate.

S,S. Imaginary portraits of famous courtesans of the past are to be seen in some number, and are of lesser interest, since the artists, with no visual information about how their subjects looked, feel no requirement or basis for departing more than slightly from the formula. Real portraits of courtesans done from life, or at least during the person's lifetime and presumably reflecting some first-hand knowledge of her physiognomy, are rarer; in fact, I know only two. Both support, I think, the argument that real portraits and generic pictures of beautiful women were kept distinct by the artists and most of their audiences. This one, a joint work of the early Ch'ing masters of Nanking Wu Hung and Fan Ch'i, portrays K'ou Mei or K'ou Pai-men, a courtesan of the Ch'in-Huai pleasure district in Nanking who was a contemporary of the artists. An inscription written later on the painting supplies information about her: she was bought out at the age of 18 or 19 by a high official named Chu Kuo-pi and became his concubine. When, upon the fall of Nanjing to the Manchus in 1645, Chu was put under house arrrest and suffered the confiscation of all his property, K'ou Mei repaid him by purchasing his freedom with a thousand pieces of gold. When went back then to the life of prostitution, presumably to recoup her fortunes and provide for her later years. She would drink all day with guests, and when by evening she was inebriated shewould give vent to her feelings in singing and weeping. It is at this stage of her career that she is portrayed, presumably from in the portrait, done in 1651.
She sits under a tree, as male poets do sometimes in their portraits, her gesture and tilted head seem expressive of some inner state or feeling, not directed outward to some imagined viewer; she seems in fact to be comfortably alone in nature, perhaps composing a poem. Her face, while simply drawn, reveals the "refined, quiet beauty" praised in the inscription, and is the face of an individual, not accomodated to some impersonal ideal of beauty. Sexuality is de-emphasized in the picture, and the gender-specific avoided; these aspects of it are important, but cannot be explored here.

S,S. The other example known to me is a small but remarkable picture bearing the title "True Face of Courtesan Tung." Another woman of the Ch'in-Huai district in Nanjing, Courtesan Tung herself had it painted around 1560 by the well-known artist Ch'ien Ku, to send to her lover Wang Huai, an official who came from a prominent family of Hsiu-ning in Anhui. The poet and collector Huang Chi-shui provides this information in his preface composed in 1561 for a long series of poems that accompany the painting; two other noted literai of the time, Mo Shih-lung and Hsiang Sheng-mo, wrote titles for it. According to Huang Chi-shui's account, she was worried that her lover's memory of her face would fade over a separation of several years, and had this "true image" of it made to send to him, to remind him of her beauty. Through the sensitivity and artistic skill of Ch'ien Ku she also reminds him, and persuades us, that this beauty was more than a surface attribute. Her hair is done up plainly in a bun; her adornments, earring and hairpins, are similarly modest, as is her unornamented jacket. She turns away in a reserved three-quarter view, not looking outward toward us--or, more properly, toward her lover Wang Huai, the intended viewer of the picture. And once more, the drawing of her eyes, eyebrows, and mouth indicates intelligence and character more than conventional prettiness.

-- S. As Judith Zeitlin points out, when the beauty in a story or play has her portrait painted, or paints it herself, it usually portends her imminent death--she is leaving a pictorial record of her beauty before it is too late. The classical case is in the play Mu-tan T'ing or Peony Pavilion, to which this is an illustration: the heroine Tu Li-niang paints her self-portrait by observing her face in a mirror and simply copying it (a version of how portraiture is accomplished that itself calls into question the writer's understanding of it.) We can hope that the portrait of Courtesan Tung, so far as I know the only extant work that can be recognized as the outcome of such a resolve on the woman's part, presaged no such tragic end for her. (I haven't pursued the matter enough to know for sure.)

-- S. The seeming informality and modesty of Ch'ien Ku's portrait might persuade us that it is drawn directly from life; and it may indeed have been. But normal practice in China was for the portraitist to make a prelimary drawing that the sitter would approve before the finished portrait was done. Lo P'ing's portrayal of Yuan Mei, shown earlier, was an example; another is this, one of an album of late Ming portraits of famous men of Chekiang province in the Nanking Museum. The "warts-and-all" realism of these prelimary drawings would presumably have given way to smoothed-out, blander faces in the finished works. If we had a similar series of portraits of women done from life, would they prove to be raw representations like these?

S,S. Although no series of sketch-portraits of women survives from so early a date, to my knowledge, some part of an answer might be seen in a set of albums, of undeterminate date (but probably late), owned by the calligrapher-scholar Huang Miaozi, who bought them in Beijing in the 1950s with the understanding that they had come from a famous portrait studio located in the north part of the capital. Which of them are from life and which posthumous, from the corpse or even (if we can believe popular accounts) from descriptions of the deceased offered by family members, is beyond determination. In any case, they offer evidence that where male portraits could be strongly differentiated and unflattering, those of women, at least of younger women, deviated less from the ideal of feminine beauty. In appreciating them we can recognize the double charge faced by the portraitist of these subjects.
S,S. (Two more.) On the one hand, we can imagine, the women and their husbands or lovers (as in the "Courtesan Tung" picture) must have appreciated having them portrayed in images that conformed enough to the "beauty's face" ideal of their time flatter them slightly by ascribing to them some measure of beauty; on the other hand, they wanted their portraits to be recognizable as representations of themselves as distinct individuals. Any artist who has made portraits of younger women, in whatever tradition, must surely have learned to maneuver between these two sets of expectations. By defining in this way the problem faced by portraitists of women we can both understand the occasional ambiguities that allowed portraits to be mistaken for meiren or the reverse, and recognize that the distinction, both in intent and in outcome, was nonetheless real and normally unproblematic for those conversant with the code.

S,S. (An early 18th cent. portrait of a woman in the Nelson Gallery, K.C.) It is clear that far less deviation from the ideal was tolerated in portraits of women. Ch'ien Ku, then, had the double charge or "painter's brief" (in Baxandall's term) of conveying Courtesan Tung's beauty, the very purpose of his painting, and at the same time conveying enough of her distinguishing features to make the picture recognizable as her portrait. And the features that answer to the latter of these two requirements are the ones that distinguish the picture, and other portraits from life of women, however beautiful, from generic mei-jen paintings.
S,S. Two more examples, details from group portraits of families, late 17th and 18th centuries, to conclude this section of my talk. Portrait faces, especially of women, understandably exhibit no distinct facial expressions; any woman having her portrait done would surely have preferred the infinite options of an impassive face to the narrower characterization imposed by a particular expression. But the generic meiren paintings, because they ordinarily situate the women within particular implicit narratives, do allow a degree of facial expressiveness, an opening that was exploited to good effect by some of the artists who painted them from the late Ming through the middle Ch'ing period. I will conclude with a look at the kinds of differentiation we can find in them.

S,S. The ability of Japanese print designers, notably the late18th century master Utamaro, to START HERE

Put in Yü Chih-ting here: bitter look, vs. (ptg that could almost be companion piece) drowsy pleasure.

(Then on to: Huang Shih-fu)
A picture titled "A Fairy Beauty at Quiet Rest," painted in 1640 by a minor master from Fukien named Huang Shih-fu, portrays the charming girl seated on a garden rock, wearing a see-through gauze jacket over the apron-like undergarment called mo-hsiung. This is not a portrayal of a woman waiting for her lover to come; her look and gesture imply the presence of a beholder, and the poem confirms this, beginning "Dimly one perceives a wafting of faint fragrance" and containing the lines "She does not speak, yet her love is sincere;/ She blushes but entices a tacit intimacy." Her dishabille in the presence of a man (with whom the viewer of the painting identifies) implies her sexual availability, which is again underscored in the poem, and in her face, with narrowed eyes and little finger touching her mouth. The artist's inscription dedicates the picture to a certain "Old Mr. Ts'an" and notes that it is the eighteenth scroll, presumably of a series. Were these portraits of old Mr. Ts'an's concubines, or famous courtesans of some pleasure district, or a catalog of types of beauty, like the print series designed by Utamaro in 18th-century Japan? We can only guess; but we can recognize in the picture one type of particularized facial expression: the woman aware of being looked at by a man, her lover or potential lover. Here, the male viewer of the painting can occupy this position in imagination.

(my ptg, turning out light)

S,S. But even when a man is represented in the painting, as in this picture of Yang Kuei-fei bathing, probably by Ku Chien-lung of the early Ch'ing, the viewer can still be enticed into a feeling of complicity by the woman's look, directed outward toward him, and by her self-conscious smile which the the imperial voyeur himself cannot see, since her face is turned toward us and away from him.

S,S. Such complicity with an implied viewer outside the painting would be unthinkable when the male lover portrayed is not a figure from the distant past, but the reigning emperor--here Ch'ien-lung, for whom this pair of paintings was done, probably as a collaboration between Chin T'ing-piao and Lang Shih-ning or Castiglione. The expression on the face of Ch'ien-lung's consort is a response to the imperial gaze, indicating her consciousness of it in her raised eyebrows and slightly crooked smile: Yes, it says, I know you are looking at me, and am entirely receptive.

S,S. (what? 8 Consorts of T'ang Yin.) A mid-18th century writer named Chiang I, in a note on paintings of beautiful women (one of the very few references to them in the literature), advises that "their eyes can be large or small, their eyebrows sparse or heavy; their faces are all unlike each other. But any of these can be the ultimate in beauty. You only have to capture their essence in their gaze." (Tu-hua chi-wen, in Hua-yüan pi-chi, 3b.)

S.S. Cf. Ukiyo-e prints (or ptgs) in Japan. Similarly, women's faces tend to be uniform in any one period & style; but
S,S. (Utamaro) When it's to artist's purpose, (etc.--class; mood. Two pairs?)
S,S. In China, facial expression on women usually indicated low social class, or (as here) demonic status; used when narrative required it. (explain). But well-born women, presented as possessions of men, could only ...

How to escape this? Portraits, of course; but that's beyond our subject. Portraits of courtesans, done during their lifetimes: only two known to me. (Show, discuss.)

Another type that permits escape from "pretty face" picture: imaginary portraits of women of past. Most interesting of these known to me are two by little-noticed artist named Ts'ui Hui, active in north in late K'ang-hsi/Yung-cheng, somehow assoc. w. Chiao Ping-chen and Leng Mei. (Two pictures of Li Ch'ing-chao, Sung poet.) That this was a period when women had more access to literary education is now known through quite a few studies, including those of Dorothy Ko. Also big issue of controversy among men, bet. those such as Li Yü and Yüan Chiang who favored giving them a literary education so that they could compose poetry and prose--as indeed they did, again subj. of much recent scholarship--and those such as Chang Hsüeh-tseng who argued strongly (and angrily, Yüan Mei being one of his targets) that education for women should be limited to Confucian moral texts, both to guide them in their own deportment and to make them more effective as teachers of their children, especially male children. (Etc.) We would like to know about audience and patronage for such ptgs, and would like to locate it somewhere within the coteries and networks of literary women that were highly dev. by this time. But no firm evidence. Can only say that while images of literary women can be intended as objects of desire by men, as in examples we'll see later, these don't appear to be that--these women make none of enticing gestures, have none of come-hither attributes, that identify those other paintings.

Under "Mme Hotung" etc.: note that although face remains nearly expressionless, tilt of head, posture, can change whole effect: in this, like Nô dance-drama and Bunraku puppet theater in Japan: masks, but can be made subtly expressive by angle of view. Kuan-yin seems to express compassion, "Mme Hotung" allure, etc. In family scene, expres. of concern?

WCP3

Images and Roles of Gentlewomen

A. Portraits of Gentlewomen
Note: this whole chapter is old text; will have to be heavy revised to consider possibility of some pictures of gentlewomen having been painted principally for other women, in line with my "Paintings for Women?" article. Also recent writings on increased participation in cultural activities by guixiu, gentlewomen, from early Qing. These are taken account of in PUP, not so much here. References are generally old, sometimes incomplete. If, as we have seen, portrayals of courtesans and concubines as objects of desire exhibit identifying characteristics, so do paintings of "respectable" women, those from gentry families, principal wives and daughters, who are portrayed in different guises and circumstances from the concubines and for different purposes. They are often identified in accompanying inscriptions as the wives or daughters or sometimes mothers of notable men--it is less common for them to be presented independently of any relationship to a male. Gentlewomen appear in their portraits, as we might expect, in proper, often conventional images; they have prepared themselves for public viewing and are introduced to us decorously, as the women themselves might be to guests, situated in the private but not intimate spaces of gardens and reception halls. (Fill in when ptgs located & photos available: Proper portraiits of women in interiors: one in Nelson Gal.? heavy-set woman w. necklace, fig. 3/1. One in Nanjing Mus.? fig. 3/2. Two in gardens: one early 18th century in date, by Gu Fang & Shen Ying, Nelson Gal., represents an unknown woman, fig. 3/3; other, dated 1790, portrays the woman poet and artist Wang Yüyan painting orchids, fig. 3/4. Both are collaborations between professional portraitists and landscape artists who filled in the settings. ) Zeng Qing and Yü Zhiding, prominent portraitists of late Ming & early Qing, respectively, don't seem to have ptd women? (any real portraits by either of them? But Chen Hongshou did, portrait of Lai Lu-chih, 1637 (considered below) Long insc.: give gist.] [Here: brief discussion of women portrayed as looking out at viewer, continuing from end of ch. I. Gentlewomen & meiren have this in common, but different implications: along w. pose, settings, other elements, induce us to read them differently. Both can be cool stare; in meiren, often involves challenge, engagement; gentlewomen more aloof, both postures & faces deliberately inexpressive.] [Some leakage: gentlewomen in ptgs of them, or portraitists portraying them, can adopt some limited, relatively innocuous features of meiren ptgs: woman in Gu/Shen ptg, for instance, holds Buddha's-hand fruit; another holds ju-i scepter. Not invitational, in this context. Refer to passage in early part of PUP Ch. 5, where question of portraits vs. meiren dealt with—in literature, one often mistaken for other, but this is literary convention.]

The major portrait specialists of the Ming-Qing transition, such as Zeng Qing and Yü Zhiding, seem not to have painted serious portraits of individual women, but these appear increasingly in the 18th century and later, a development that parallels the well-studied increase in the rate of literacy and opportunity for individual achievement by women in this period. Add: Become stronger, more individualized, generally finer in later 19c--examples by Ren Bonian (working in collaboration w. portraitists) etc. Figs. 3/5, 6, 7, 8. Bright little girl? IYiyuan Duoying 10, 26. For this, cf. Susan Mann in Engendering China p. 32-34: on precocious little girls. Double portraits of man & woman from Ming onward. Good example from early Qing: Yü Zhiding No--other artist in Palace Mus., Beijing, fig. 3/9. Interior. Woman holds hand of little boy, who holds peach; they watch two cats playing w. another peach. Man and male servant; female servant lower l., ladling wine? from pot. Find this, identify. Outdoor one: large horiz. ptg with seals of Hu Yung, unident. Christie's auction, June 4, 1986, no. 110; ink and colors on paper, 94 x 161.5 cm. Two seals of Hu Yung. Fig. 3/10. No: just make ref. to section on family portraits in PUP, including this (Fig. 4.19 there). In this early 19th century family group portrait by a minor master named Hu Yung, the wife is given a distinct identity, equal to that of the husband; she dominates the further porch, with her daughters around her, as he does the nearer one with his sons. Anon. ptg. in BM, family group portrait: no sig. or seal, fig. 3/11. (= PUP 4.18) Naive but charming. Late 18c? Six main figures: three men, father & two sons? and three women, presum. their wives, plus children (all boys?) and servants. Handscroll ptg. in Tientsin Munic. Mus., known to me only in small, unclear reprod, fig. 3/12 and 3/13. (= PUP 4.17.) But even from this, appears to be important addition to body of works of this type: agrees in all features w. productions of "urban professionals." Artist given as a certain Ch'ang-yin, unidentified. Hope to see & study. This is surely depiction of particular household, done to be treasured w/in it, shown to guests; kind of group portrait in setting of rich villa. This all belongs in discussion of portraits of families in their domestic settings—in PUP Ch. IV. The women in these true portraits, especially when they are shown alone or with servants, are presented as relatively self-sufficient, with projects of their own, and as individuals--this in contrast to the generic paintings of beautiful women, in which the aspect of waiting sets them into a provisional status, and the very requirement of ideal beauty more or less precludes individualization, dictating instead conformity to a currently favored type. Even in dual or group portraits, however, when the wife was young and assumedly beautiful, or when she was perhaps a second wife or concubine, she was always in danger of being subsumed into the generic type. (But see passage toward end of "Ptgs for Women?" in which it is suggested that this was what women preferred.) Two portraits by Yü Zhiding, painted in 1697 (fig. 3/14) and 1705 (fig. 3/15), exemplify along with many others what we might term the "real man and artificial woman" pairing, in which the female participants, while they must represent particular people, are reduced to playing roles (holding his baby, playing the qin (zither) to entertain him), and serve along with other elements of his surroundings--the sword, the cypress tree, the books--to characterize and aggrandize the man.

Their images conform so completely to artistic conventions that they appear to belong to the realm of art, along with the rocks and trees, and are denied the real-world status that the men can claim by their substantial presences and individualized faces. Chinese representations of women, as we will continue to note, often accord them only a kind of contingent existence. The visual separation of levels of seeming reality is even more complex in a portrait handscroll painted jointly by the late Ming figure master Chen Hongshou and two others, in which the three participants in the garden scene are represented in three separate modes (fig. 3/16.) At the two extremes, both within the picture space and on the scale between reality and artifice, are the subject, a certain He Tianzhang, and the servant playing a flute: He Tianzhang projects a real-life substantiality that is totally absent from the diminutive image of the flute-player, who is rendered in Chen Hongshou's archaistic linear manner with elongated head and unarticulated body. Occupying a position midway between these two in location, in size, and in mode of representation is the young woman, presumably Ho's wife or concubine (detail, fig. 3/17.) The argument might be made that in portraying the woman as a perfect exemplar of current criteria of beauty, the artist is flattering her. But again, it is rather the man who is being flattered, for possessing a consort of such loveliness; she is presented more as an attribute of his than as an individual. The branch of blossoming plum on the fan she displays pertains more to him than to her, standing for his continuing virility, like the plum tree which even in old age flowers each spring. Again see passage twd. end of "Ptgs for Women?" "Move this practice from victim column to agent column?" When, by contrast, Chen Hongshou (working again in collaboration with a professional portraitist) does a true portrait of Lou Yüede (1599-1651), the wife of one of his relatives, he allows her to be plainer but also to be a real person (fig. 3/18.)

The bamboo painted on the fan she holds represents sterner Confucian virtues of uprightness and integrity, and presumably attributes those virtues to her. B. Roles and Occupations of Gentlewomen in Paintings A survey of Ming-Qing paintings in which women appear permits us not only to identify the sets of conventions that separate pictures of gentlewomen or respectable women (I drop the quotation marks without meaning to accept all the implications of the term) from those of courtesans and concubines, but also to make lists or repertories of the roles and activities considered suitable for each. Respectable women, to begin with, appear regularly in family scenes, performing almost always the same role: looking after the children. In the large, anonymous example considered in the previous chapter (fig. 2/32)(= PUP 4.5), the man whose birthday is being celebrated properly dominates the gathering by his size and centrality. The man's older sons, wearing caps that indicate they will follow in his footsteps as scholar-officials and so continue to enrich and empower the family, bring him auspicious and symbolic gifts. The women, who presumably include domesticated concubines along with the principal wife, have no active part in all this, but simply take care of the smaller children. Confucian texts of the period stress this role while discouraging the women from attempting most others. No painting of a woman in the center of a comparable composition survives, to my knowledge, but the early 16th century master Tang Yin is recorded as having done a commemorative painting for the 80th birthday of a "worthy mother," Mme. Zhou, with her sons beside her and scholarly guests approaching to do her honor. Similarly, in an outdoor village scene by Hua Yan, a highly accomplished master active in Hangzhou and Yangzhou mainly in the second quarter of the 18th century, the men are strongly differentiated (even to the inclusion of a hunchback and a dwarf) and play out role-images of rustic ease, while the two women again appear as types and again mind the babies (fig. 3/19.) The same pattern can be found in many other group figure paintings. (Put in here: teaching children, i/o simply looking after them. Move up from "learned women" sec'n, refer back there. A painting by some follower of Hua Yan in the 18th century pictorializes this ideal in a simple way (fig. 3/20), as the 19th-century master Ren Xiong does with greater sophistication in a woodblock print from a book published in 1856 (fig. 3/21). (Bring in: Dorothy Ko on women as educators, pp. 165-6.) (These are role models, exemplars. Hessney, "Beyond Beauty & Talent" p. 215, cites Arthur Wright in Confuc. Personalities on use of these, applies to women's roles: in ptgs, women tend to be seen acting out these roles.) The other traditional occupation for women, along with child-rearing, was the production and ornamentation of textiles. Pictures of women preparing newly-woven silk, resting after embroidery, making clothes for warriors away at battle, and related subjects make up a substantial part of surviving early paintings of feminine subjects, works of the kind associated with the Tang masters Zhang Xuan and Zhou Fang and their successors.

The many versions of the Gengzhi tu, "Pictures of Ploughing and Weaving" or rice and silk production, make it clear that the latter is woman's work. (Very early: ritual plowing for emperor, mulberry-picking for empress.) In a painting by Chen Hpngshou in the British Museum (fig. 3/22), the lady holds a robe with a design of dragons and mountains, while her maids bring a censer for perfuming it, hooks for hanging it, and (at left) a needle and thread. An anonymous Ming picture (fig. 3/23), although its ostensible theme is "Spooling Thread," is a predecessor of the Qing-period meiten paintings, since the graceful bearing and elegant hairdo of the woman draw more attention than does her occupation. (Fill this out. Where? Slide?) A cool, neo-classical composition painted by Wen Zhengming in 1551 depicts two ladies in Tang costume picking mulberry leaves to feed silkworms, an activity with both ritual and practical functions (fig. 3/24). (These celebrate women's involvement in these occupations. Li Yü put needlework fourth on his list of "talents": see Dorothy Ko p. 265. Also p. 345 n. 64.) Ren Bonian in 1885 gives us a haunting picture of a woman who has come out into a grove of bare trees, probably in early morning, to wash thread (fig. 3/25).

It may refer to a story in which the famous beauty Xishi is encountered washing silk on a stream bank by a high official of the Yüe state; but Ren makes no specific pictorial reference to the story, and the painting can be read simply as a sensitively-observed genre scene. [Others: ptg in one of tulu vols. (= Zhongguo lidai shuhua tulu) of woman sewing in interior: seems to be by one of urban-profes. artists. Identifiable? some illusionism, e.g. in bamboo seen through translucent blind. Fig. 3/26.] This was deleted from PUP. Within the large myth of "women waiting," needlework was merely one of the ways they passed their time; but textile production and sewing were in real life important sources of income for families and for individual women. We read stories of courtesans who supported impoverished lovers with their needlework, and it has been argued that some of the repressive restrictions placed on women in the later periods were meant to thwart the potential for economic independence created by their money-earning engagement in textile production. The paintings, of course, betray no such tensions, remaining always idealized and unproblematic. Refer to book on textile production by women—Hill Gates? C. Images of Learned and Talented Women A category of Ming-Qing pictures that does seem to reflect contemporary changes in women's social position is representations of learned and scholarly women, talented women, women participating in artistic and literary pursuits: it is clear from surviving examples that these proliferate in the later centuries, and become more varied and interesting. If we look for images of scholarly women in the Ming, two come to mind immediately. One is the daughter of the third century B.C. scholar Fu Sheng: when the old man was giving lectures to a scribe sent by the court on an historical text he had preserved through the book-burning of the first Ch'in emperor, she interpreted his explanations because his antique speech was impossible to understand. She is shown serving in this capacity of intermediary in paintings of the scene, such as the one by the mid-Ming master Du Jin (fig. 3/27.) The other is Lady Xuanwen Jun, a fourth century woman portrayed by Chen Hongshou in his well-known painting done in 1638 for the 60th birthday of his aunt and flattering her by association with this learned lady (fig. 3/28.) Xuanwen Jun was invited by her ruler to give lectures to 120 students on a classical text, in the interpretation of which her family had specialized. Ellen Laing has pointed out, however, that she was invited only as the sole surviving authority on this text, all the males having died. In each case, the woman is more a transmitter of learning than a producer of it. Still, these are respectful images that allow women to take part in a sphere of activity from which they were customarily excluded.

A less-known painting, unsigned but apparently from its style a work by the Ming master Zhang Lu (ca. 1490-ca. 1563), portrays two women, wearing identical fur-lined hats and robes, seated on rugs in a winter landscape examining an ink painting of bamboo (fig. 3/29). Richard Barnhart, who first published the work, recognized that one of the women was probably the Yüan-period artist Guan Daosheng (1262-1319), who specialized in ink paintings of bamboo, a genre she probably learned from her husband Zhao Mengfu. Jennifer Purtle, in an unpublished paper, took the further step of identifying the other woman as a mythical older sister named Guan Taogao, who was invented in Ming writings so that she could serve as Guan Dapsheng's zhiyin or "audience of one." The addition was more than a simple deception: it responded to an increase in women's literacy and a desire to see this reflected in literature and art; but even more, to the growth of audiences of women for the literary and artistic productions of other women. Ellen Widmer writes about the appearance during a slightly later period, the Ming-Qing transition, of a "loose literary network" of women writers who "encouraged one another's endeavors." Zhang Lu's painting can best be read as an early pictorial expression of that new phenomenon; one can speculate, but no more, that it might have been done for someone who was herself involved in such a network, perhaps for presentation to another. (bring into discussion somewhere: ambivalence abt this; well-known saying about "A woman w/o talent is a woman of virtue", artistic talent as kind of "evil omen," examples of association of lit. talent etc. w. misfortune: Chang & Chang 209 ff.etc. Dorothy Ko p. 160 ff: "To be virtuous is to be untalented." She puts in perspective: signified "anxieties over the erosion of social and gender boundaries." Handlin on literacy, 28: saying widespread in late Ming: "Only virtuous man talented, only untalented woman virtuous." Read again: Kang-i Sun Chang article in Culture and State volume. Widmer 27 top: preference for beauty over talent. 28-29: ambiguous messages from men, don't read too much, become learned. But remember always that men are stressing their ideal, doesn't corres. w. reality.

All this needs complete rewriting. Useful: Rowe, Saving the World, 320 ff: Chen Hongmou on women’s freedom etc., complaining. 314: Yuan Mei defends practice of concubinage “because of inherent inferiority of females to males.” Good: Xiao-chen Hu in David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, ed., Dynastic Crisis and Culural Innovation 227-231, "Late Ming Thought and the Status of Women." (Insert here? ptg pub. as Cui Zizhong, woman in garden writing? at desk. Late Ming, anyway?) A few other individual artists deserve recognition for having gone beyond stereotypes, no doubt partly in response to new conditions of their time, in their portrayals of women. One, certainly, is Chen Hongshou: the female figures in his paintings do not play music only to entertain men, but play for each other, or for themselves, and generally display more independence and initiative than they are usually accorded in paintings. Chen reportedly did some of his paintings as gifts for courtesans, who can be assumed to have been educated women, and paintings of this kind may have been intended for them. In one late work it is the man who holds the wrapped pipa--traditionally her instrument, associated with singing girls and popular songs--and the woman who reads the book (fig. 3/30.) What Chen intended by this seeming role reversal we cannot say--he is often enigmatic--but it is in the right direction. Another painting by him, which similarly bears only a terse inscription with no clue to its meaning, is usually taken to represent "A Scholar Instructing Girl Pupils in the Arts"--one young woman arranges a branch of blossoming plum in a vase, the other examines a painting of bamboo, while the assumed mentor looks on (fig. 3/31.) However we read the group, it is certainly the man who dominates; but this picture, too, bends the conventions and leans in the right direction. It might be seen as anticipating a popular print from the early 20th century celebrating the new age in which, as the title states, "women seek education" (fig. 3/32.) [Develop this a bit. The two works span the period when... (etc.) Susan Mann, "Grooming a Daughter for Marriage," 214: by Qing times, upper-class women could be trained in needlework, poetry, painting, calligraphy, and "music-making." Dorothy Ko p. 266 (ms) ff: 3 arguments for educating women: role as moral guardian; poetic & artistic achievements increased "cultural capital" of family; men wanted companionate wives.."increased her cachet in the marriage market."] An observation that will be developed in a later chapter is that the Ming artists who give us the most sympathetic portrayals of women, Wu Wei and Chen Hongshou, and the Qing writers who are notably supportive of women's engagement in literary composition, Li Yü and Yüan Mei, all have reputations themselves as womanizers. We can, as we choose, regard this two-pronged affection for femininity as representing positive and negative aspects of the same attachment, or feel that the men's respect for the intellectual and artistic capacities of women casts their sexual adventures in a more favorable light. Ren Bonian in the late 19th century is another whose images of women grant them dignity and a degree of independence, as in his picture in which the wife reads poems to her husband (fig. III/32), or his portrayal (done with a professional portraitist) of a certain Yang Jixian at the age of 75 (fig. 3/33.) (Work over insc. Yang Jixian is same person portrayed in 3/5!) Ren Bonian is not known as having himself had any special fondness for women, and his sympathetic portrayals of them might be seen simply as a function of the period in which he worked: by his time old restrictions were even more breaking down, and his success in portraying women may simply be a matter of his response to new conditions.

Also to be credited, however, is Ren Bpnian's extraordinary sensitivity to human feelings--he is even today not fully understood or appreciated as a painter, being too often dismissed as a maker of popular and decorative pictures. Whether and how women should be encouraged to engage in the arts at all was an issue that could generate considerable tension in Ming-Qing times. Some reflection of it can perhaps be seen in a handscroll painted by the Ming master Dai Chin in 1460 (fig. 3/34.) The gathering depicted was a poetry party held in 1353 on the shore of the West Lake at Hanzhou, in the villa and garden of a man named Mp Jingxing, at which the most distinguished guest was the renowned litterateur Yang Weizhen (dates). Dai Chin was commissioned by one of Mo Jingxing's descendants to do the work as a frontispiece for the surviving copy of the series of poems composed on that occasion. Dai Chin's composition focuses the central figure group on a red-jacketed woman, presumably a courtesan, writing a scroll--poems, calligraphy?--while the male literary figures watch. Since Yang Weizhen was notorious for consorting with prostitutes, this decision of the artist, probably based on his knowledge of Yang's proclivities and perhaps also on some record of the event, was taken to impart a somewhat scandalous tone to the picture, and the family was not pleased, as Mo Jingxng's descendant reveals in his inscription on the scroll. By the time of the Ming-Qing transition, women painting and writing calligraphy are not uncommon in popular stories and plays, and appear in illustrations to them, for instance in one of a set of playing cards based on the Pipa Xing or "Lute Song" , in which the woman prepares to paint a hanging scroll (fig. 3/35) or Gai Qi's early 19th century woodcut illustrations to Hong Lou Meng or "Dream of the Red Chamber" representing Xichun, the half-sister of the hero Baoyü, about to do her painting of the Daguan Garden (fig. 3/36.) A play by the early Qing litterateur Li Yü titled "Ideal Love Matches" illustrates comically the ambiguities that still beset this practice, however, in the public mind. The principals of the play are two courtesan-painters who earn money doing forgeries of the prominent literati artists Dong Qichang and Chen Jiru. One of them is forced to paint before an audience of townspeople, to dispel their suspicion that her paintings were really done by a man. Even while watching her paint they comment on the beauty of her face and voice instead of on her painting, and are not satisfied until the maid draws aside the curtain before the table so that they can admire her tiny bound feet. The play has a "happy ending," which Li Yü must have written with tongue firmly in cheek: the two meet Dong Qichang and Chen Jiru and eventually marry them. [Add note after working over Marsha's passage on Dong's inscription. See also Dorothy Ko, p. 184, on this play. Also Li Waiyee on them: Writing Women 59 ff. Also Ko in same vol, 79 bottom & later.) (Chang & Chang p. 114: quote someone writing sympathetically about a woman, saying "too bad you aren't a man." And note that once more, they aren't producing truly original work, but imitating Chen and Dong.] In spite of this ambivalence, expressions of admiration among literary men for the cai-nü or talented woman, and instances of her portrayal in fiction and painting, continued to grow in number and interest.

Several imaginary portraits survive of the most famous Chinese woman poet, Li Qingzhao (1084-ca. 1151). (On her, see Dorothy Ko, p. 184.) In one of these, by the 18th century figure painter Cui Hui, the poet reclines on a rock and looks out at us, but not invitingly (fig. 3/37.) Although this picture of Li Qingzhao is in some respects akin to the beautiful-woman paintings, such as the "Leng Mei" painting in the British Museum (fig. 1/8), the differences are more telling: a posture devoid of sensuality, clothing buttoned up around the neck, a garden rock instead of a bed. It is the painters of the generic beautiful-women pictures who in fact appear often to have appropriated the image of the literary woman to heighten the appeal of their pin-ups for men attracted by the prospect of rubbing minds along with pudenda. One may be reminded of Woody Allen's story "The Whore of Mensa," which imagines an intellectual call-girl service: the client phones, and shortly afterwards a Barnard girl comes to his apartment and discusses Kierkegaard with him. (Ref.) Cf. to "real Mme. Hedong," similar. (But on desirability of educated women as sex partners, see also Susan Suleiman, 75 ff: quotes Barthes. (See my sheet, in "notes") Also 82: "prototypical figure in the male imagination, the woman who is sexual because her sexuality is male in its values...") Sex w. educated woman transgresses Confuc. norms in several ways, has excitement of transgression.) (Bring in here somehow? story of Su Shi's (fictitious) younger sister and her marriage to Qin Guan--apocryphal, impossible, but expressive of male feeling about perils & pleasures of being involved with woman smarter than oneself.) . A coolly elegant painting of a woman in her study in the Palace Museum, Beijing is Cui Hui's imaginary portrait of the Sung poet Li Qingzhao (fig. 3/38.). The woman rises from her desk, where she has been reading, as if to greet a visitor. The spare furnishings, the rootwood stand and bronze duck-shaped censer, testify to the woman's austere and antiquarian taste. The style is correspondingly formal and precise; western-derived elements in it underly the lucid spatial scheme and the depiction of furniture and architecture, but these elements are not at all intrusive, having been absorbed into a Chinese mode with which the artist seems entirely comfortable. Note that she pulls chair back & points to it: inviting husband? a woman visitor, fellow poet? to sit down? Note also that there is some resemblance in the face, hairdo & ornament, drawing of dress, with signed Cui Hui/) One more imaginary portrait from the Qing dynasty concludes our brief series. Kang Tao, a figure master active around the middle of the 18th century, portrays a woman named San Niangzi, a sixteenth century Mongol princess of exceptional beauty and intelligence who was literate in Chinese and deeply respectful of Han Chinese culture (fig. 3/39.)

As the consort successively of three Mongol nobles and generals, the first of them her own father by whom she bore three sons, she played an important role in improving Mongol-Chinese relations and resolving border conflicts. Kang Tao presents her as a self-assured and capable woman with a foxy look. The ambiguous feelings that Chinese men can have had about a woman of this strength and complexity, how these might be reflected in Kang Tao's painting, and what kind of recipient the work might have been intended for, are questions on which we can only speculate. D. Goddesses and Ghosts Insert here: brief section on goddesses, such as Magu (Jade Terrace p. 173); Guanyin; goddess of moon, weaving maid, etc.--in Zhe/Wu school ptg. No more than three additional illustrations: 3/40, 41, 42. On ghosts, only Luo Ping? Note paper by Karin Myhre of our DEAL, paper for 1994 symposium, my binder under D. Judith Zeitner's article Yale '93 conference. E. Other Late-Period Images of Women, Strong and Frail Although Ming-Qing Chinese men could admire and portray literary and cultivated women of the past, the involvement of gentry women of their own time in literature and the arts aroused more mixed feelings. It was even felt by some to reduce the femininity and attractiveness of the women. In opposition to the arguments of Yüan Mei and others that women should receive the kind of education directed toward aesthetic refinement and literary cultivation, a sterner Confucian view, advocated by writers from Lü Kun in the 16th century to Zhang Xuezeng in the 18th, held that their education should be of the traditional, classical kind that would inculcate virtue, equip them better for the practical tasks of running the household, and fit them to start their children on the path to moral learning.

That attitude is reflected in pictures such as the two introduced earlier (fig. 3/20, 3/21) in which women are seen teaching their sons. Representations of women in late period China, then, can be found that answer to virtually any of the positions being taken in the ongoing arguments about the proper status and roles of women, how much and what kind of education they should receive, and so forth. But the arguments, in turn, are mostly better read as responding, often with alarm, to the transformations in women's situations that were actually taking place than as seriously affecting them; they cannot be taken as unambiguous indicators of social realities. Neither, of course, can the paintings, especially those of the generic meiren type, since these were made for male consumers as projections of their desires. When we encounter, for instance, a painting of what appears to be a militant woman, such as the one (signed by?) an artist named Ho Qing (fig. 3/43, Nelson Gal.?), in which the woman is rolling up the sleeve of her gown in preparation for wielding the sword on the couch behind her, we may be reminded of the popularity of woman warriors such as Mulan in Ming-Qing literature and sometimes paintings, or of late Ming courtesans who practiced swordplay, or of how one of them, Xue Su-su, could do feats of marksmanship with a crossbow while galloping on horseback, or of how Liu Yin took part in gatherings with Qian Qianyi and his literary friends dressed in male clothing; we want to read a breakdown of gender distinctions and roles into the pictures. Then we remember that Xue and Liu were courtesans, and behaved and dressed as they did partly to please their patrons (Liu Yin, when she arrived at Qian Qianyi's studio in male garb, reportedly made sure that her tiny bound feet protruded from beneath her robe); and we realize, reluctantly, that the images of literary cultivation or militancy or cross-dressing among our meiren pictures similarly cannot be read simply as celebrating strength and independence in women, but must be seen primarily as reflecting different versions of sexual attractiveness in the eyes of their male viewers. The painting, then, which is stylistically another example of the westernized-illusionistic manner from the late 18th or early 19th century, is probably only a variant (or deviant) meiren picture, intended for male consumers of a particular taste. (Put in here? other militant-woman images; Mulan etc. On her: Handlin on literacy, p. 24. Ayscough Ch Women 214-222. She is subject of play by Xu Wei! ("Hua Mu-lan Joins the Army in Her Father's Name.") See Robertson in Writing Women 214 ff. She was a "Tang dynasty girl who took her father's place in the army at the northern border. Though she served for twelve years, no one ever learned she was a girl, and thus her virginity was preserved." Alb. leaf in CKMHC 15: she prepares to go off ... but not interesting. Ren Bonian's, good, in Tientsin People's Art vol. of his ptgs, 6. Androgenous ptgs: women in male dress. Fig. 3/44-45.) Li Waiyee in Writing Women pp. 62-3 on women soldiers. Kou Mei (fig. 4.1) was "excellent swordswoman," acc. to Nanjing Mus. Portraits 2, no. 24 notes. Eric Chou 61-2: woman who joins lover in fighting Khitans, in Gaozong's reign. Dorothy Ko, p 342 n. 13: refers to her own article "Complicity of Women" on loyalist women warriors. See also Betty Ecke article? Move some stuff from "androgenous" in 5. See also Li Waiyee in Writing Women p. 59 below.

Coexisting with these images, outnumbering them by far, and representing a sharply contrasting ideal are the countless paintings from the later 18th and 19th centuries of willowy, strengthless beauties who seem to need to lean on trees or desks to remain upright, and to have no articulated bodies under their dresses. They embody the counter-ideal of absolute suppleness and submissiveness, the woman who may have exquisite aesthetic tastes but cannot cope alone with the real world. This image of women was traditional in poetry; Ann Birrell, for instance, writes that the typical beauty in Six Dynasties love poems should "strike a pose of appealing emotional vulnerability and pathetic physical weakness." Its prevalence as an ideal in the Qing might be seen as an attempted reassertion of Confucian constraints on the mobility and self-sufficiency of women, a reaction against what was actually taking place. A typical example of its manifestation in painting is a hanging scroll by Min Zhen dated 1779 (fig. 3/46). This frail, over-delicate type is epitomized in the romantic figure of Lin Daiyü in Hong Lou Meng, as she is seen in another of Gai Qi's woodblock-printed illustrations to the book (fig. 3/47.) Too over-refined and sickly to take charge of her own life, she can only compose poetry, sweep up and bury fallen blossoms, languish and die. She remains nevertheless everyone's favorite among the women of the Hong Lou Meng. Absent for the most part from this book are the meiren paintings from what is customarily seen as the peak period for this genre, the first half of the 19th century, when specialists in them such as Gai Qi (1744-1829), Jiang Xün (1764-1835), Ku Luo (1763-after 1837) and Fei Danxu (1801-1850) produced the works that come most readily to mind when we think about the type at all. Jiang Xün's shoulderless beauty touches her little fingernail to her lips, in the familiar gesture (fig. 3/48); Gu Luo's lady in a garden, winsomely cross-eyed, looks pensive and slightly melancholy as she waits for her lover (fig. 3/49.) These are better-than-average examples; most others slip into further depths of vapidity, presenting the women in highly conventionalized settings and postures with vacuous expressions, and betray a falling-off in quality and originality from the meiten pictures of the 17th and 18th centuries, a slide into orthodoxy that parallels the general decline in landscape painting of this same period. A few individual artists of the later 19th century attribute more dignity and character to women in their portrayals of them; we have already credited Ren Bonian as one of these. Another was his teacher Ren Xiong, whose 1856 "Lady with a Fan" presents the woman, although she is probably to be understood again as a courtesan displaying herself in a window, as provocative but without coyness, her face and stance suggesting a cool intelligence (fig. 3/50.)

The Shanghai master Wu Jiayou similarly manages in an album of 1890, without discarding entirely the old imagery of beauties languishing in their boudoirs and gardens, to impart a degree of self-sufficiency to the women, a sense that theirs are not lives of total boredom, their occupations not trivial (fig. 3/51.) The imagery is already fundamentally transformed, to be sure, by the appearance of up-to-date costumes and furniture and settings, and by a new influx of westernization in the style, which among other things makes the women's bodies more substantial. Wu is best known for his pictorial journal Wu Ruoyu huapu in which pictures of topical events were published in lithographic prints. His ladies, in spite of their bound feet and sequestered lives, stand at the threshhold of being liberated, becoming modern women. In their costumes and their demeanors they overlap with real women seen in photographs from the same period. The Qing dynasty would be succeeded by the Chinese Republic two decades later, the May Fourth Movement would further transform China a decade after that. (No, leave the following out.) We are far past the time of our proper concern, and conclude this quick survey of the late period with two pictures of the new woman in China, popular prints made in the early 20th century during the transition from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the Chinese Republic, representing girl students of that time, who have better things to do than sit about looking pretty; they wear stylish western hats and shoes, read up-to-date books, ride bicycles (fig. 3/52, 53.) Images of this kind did not, of course, drive out the meiren forever; they would be revived in popular pin-up chromolithographs of Shanghai prostitutes and dance-hall girls in the 1930s and 40s (ref.), and make a "high-culture" reappearance in paintings by the highly respected master Chang Ta-ch'ien. (ref.) Interesting as it would be, however, to chart in these the uses of familiar conventions, and to build on that basis an account of the survival of old attitudes into recent times, such a project would raise too many issues that are beyond the scope of this study, and is best left for someone else to pursue. F. Women Portrayed by Women (Insert some introductory & transitional matter here.)

Maybe quote Linda Nochlin article on "Women, Imagery, and Power": representations by men can scarcely avoid reflecting male assumptions abt. their power over women; images that escape this typically by women? But is this true in China? A study of this subject, depictions of women in paintings by Chinese women, was presented at a recent symposium by Li Shi, a young specialist in the Palace Museum, Beijing, who intends to pursue the topic in greater depth. My own account will accordingly be brief. [To be analyzed: how women turned to their purpose, "negotiated," conventions & topoi and imagery long estab in ptgs by men. Anomaly: a trad. of literature and ptg about women in which women normally played no part: produced & "consumed" by men. Women, for instance, are real subject of Jin Ping Mei, but the book was taboo for women in its time & afterwards. Poetry: male poets writing in male personae were taken to be reporting their real feelings & experience; this accepted more or less unproblematically by Chinese readers & critics. But when male poets compose in personae of women--a convention from early times--this also felt to be natural, and went unquestioned; inconsistency between two readings went unnoticed. Men felt to be providing "poetic voices" for women, whose emotions/longings would otherwise go unexpressed, or only obliquely, symbolically, in "feminine" ways. By the time composition of poetry by women becomes widespread, conventions fixed, hard to avoid; but they managed to alter them, deflect their usual implications. (Resist temptation to slip into "subaltern theory" etc. here. No ready-mades please.)] A good beginning is a painting by Qiu Zhu herself: a young woman portrayed in a garden setting, beside a pond or stream, with rocks and peony bushes nearby (fig. 3/54.) It probably belongs to the "women waiting" genre, which, as will be outlined in the last chapter, usually includes symbolic indications of sexual desire in the woman. Nothing in Qiu Zhu's picture imposes erotic overtones except, perhaps, her undone hair, and even that only classically and decorously, in keeping with the cool air of the whole composition. Several paintings with signatures of Qiu Zhu represent groups of ladies in palace gardens, and belong to the mode popularized by her father Qiu Ying. In one (fig. 3/55), an empress or imperial consort watches while a serving woman teases a parrot with a stick--the implications of "provoking the parrot" will be touched on later. Qiu Zhu does not, probably could not, depart radically from the patterns established by male artists; at most she could "rewrite" those models, "controlling or neutralizing the gaze that structures the literati-produced feminine voice," as Maureen Robertson characterizes the corresponding project in women's poetry. Qiu Zhu's paintings, and those of other women artists, are on the whole free of those features designed to facilitate visual access to the women portrayed, and visual appropriation of them. [Note Dorothy Ko book p. 466-7: women praise same attributes in other women as men do.] [Insert: sec'n on portrayals of women-by-women engaged in lit. & arts. **Two Qiu Shi leaves from Shih-erh chia; another, women in garden writing? 3/56, 3/57.

Fan Xueyi in Tientsin (she's in Jade Terrace.) 3/58. Jin Liying (1772-1807), Portrait of Li Qingzhao (after Wang Yi etc.), KK/B. 3/59. (Note that same woman, gazing at orchid, appears as "portrait of Zhao Wenshu by her daughter Luyün" copied by modern woman ptr, in Yilin Yuekan vol. 9 p. 2. And various others that purport to be portraits of Li Qingzhao, Cui Yingying, etc.--anon. Sung to Wang Yi to Tang Yin etc.--see my CA sec'n in Ptgs binder. A "Tang Yin" version of "Cui Yingying" portrait"see Suzuki index II, S1-008, Hua Shu-ho. This must be last plate in my "Ptgs for Women"!)) Also other subjects that portray strong, talented women. Fan Xueyi, Kangxi period, in album of scenes involving women (CL ming-hua 15, Shanghai, 1925), includes: Mu-lan Going Off to War; "Painting Eyebrows." Neither interesting enough to reprod.] (This must be album now in Gugong, two leaves in PUP.) The feminine form of the Bodhisattva Guanyin is a frequent subject for women painters, who were drawn to it for reasons that will be obvious. Among the many powers of the goddess was that of the Child-giving Guanyin who granted prayers for easy childbirth, or a handsome son or beautiful daughter. On the other hand, Guanyin in her divine purity represented for women an ideal of (as Yü Chün-fang puts it) "freedom from the hardships imposed on a wife, daughter-in-law, and mother ideal for which they could feel admiration or even envy--her appeal, Yü speculates, "might be…to rebellious women who wanted to liberate themselves from domestic and societal restrictions." Among the women artists who painted the subject were Qiu Zhu (fig. 3/60) and the late Ming courtesan-artist Ma Shouzhen (fig. 3/61) In this connection we can note also that Guanyin was the patron saint of prostitutes, and in one form brought about the salvation of males by offering herself to them sexually (cf. fig. 2/38.) Anyone unfamiliar with the special character of the courtesan culture of the Ming-Qing transition might expect to see, in paintings by the noted courtesans of the time, sexual subjects and sensuous styles. The qualities we find in their works are in fact at the opposite end of the spectrum: a chaste coolness of style, themes emblematic of purity.

The paintings, that is, are presented as embodiments of the same fastidiousness and reserve that was admired (as we saw earlier) in the women themselves. Like their counterparts among male literati-amateur artists, the courtesan-painters depict the Chinese orchid and bamboo in ink monochrome; when they portray women it is in images nearly devoid of sensuality, as we observe in Dong Bai's picture of the moon goddess Chang'e holding a rabbit (fig. 3/62), and in Liu Yin's of palace ladies on a terrace (fig. 3/63.) Even when the subjects carry erotic messages, the pictures themselves remain chaste. Xue Wu or Xue Su-su, who mostly painted orchids, portrays in her sole surviving figure painting a beauty in a garden playing a flute (fig. 3/64.) For anyone aware of the implications of playing the flute in Chinese paintings of women, the poetic couplet she has inscribed on her picture will be subtly titillating--it might be rendered "When the [his?] jade flute can bear to be played on [handled,] / The man is in the Phoenix Pavilion [that is, in paradise]." A fan painting by the 18th century woman artist Fan Shu (detail, fig. 3/65) represents Yang Kuei-fei emerging from her bath, but treats this theme with far more of finesse and restraint than typical depictions of it by men (cf. fig. fill in.) Chinese women artists, even those who made their physical persons available to men, seem to have refused in their paintings to play to the scopophilic urges that meiren paintings by male artists are on the whole designed to gratify. Gu Fang (active 1690-1720, pupil of Wang Hui) & Shen Ying, see Eight Dynasties #258, p. 350. Pan Gongshou and anon. portraitist, 1790, see Vinograd p. 97 and Fig. 55 for info. What? Handlin on literacy etc. Christie's auction cat., June '86, #110. Present whereabouts unknown. Ellen Laing, in her unpublished paper "Notes on Qiu Ying's Figure Paintings" (paper for "Symposium on Painting of the Ming Dynasty," Art Gallery, Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, November-December 1988), p. 16, lists the diversions of palace ladies to be seen in paintings of them, including Qiu Ying's. Her list will overlap somewhat with what follows, although I am not especially concerned, at this point, with women of the palace. Clapp, T'ang Yin, pp. 57-58. Note on the book. Reprod. in Ellen Widmer, "The Epistolary World," p. 2, from Wang Ling, ed., Yü-Yüe xian-xian xiang zhuan zan (Commemorative Portraits and Biographies of Former Worthies of the Yüe [Zhejiang] Region), 1956. Copy in Harvard-Yenching Library. E.g. Lin Shuen-fu, Transformation, p. 204, poem by Jiang Kuei, 13th cent.:"The letters after parting,/ The needlework after parting,/ My lonely soul follows my love to the distance ..." Levy Warm/Soft p. 120: story of woman who helps support her impoverished lover in this way. Hill Gates, "Commodification," pp. 820-32. See Morris Rossabi, "Kuan Tao-sheng: Woman Artist in Yuan China," in Bulletin of Sung-Yuan Studies 21, 1989, p. 73. Rossabi argues that although there is no evidence of Guan's studying painting with Zhao, the facts that he taught his sons and grandchildren, that her earliest paintings are dated to the period after their marriage, and that in an epitaph for her Zhao described her ability as a painter as "received from Heaven," all make it likely that she did. Barnhart, Painters of the Great Ming, cat. #73, pages 245-247.

Barnhart, while he convincingly identifies one of the women as Guan Dao-sheng, attributes the work tentatively to Wu Wei. In my own brief account of this painting, I have used also an unpublished paper by Jennifer Purtle, "Two Women Looking at Paintings: Women as Audiences and Patrons at the Ming Court," presented at a Symposium on the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, on April 8, 1994; I am grateful to Purtle for giving me a copy. Purtle believes, as I do, that the work is by Zhang Lu. Ellen Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China," in Late Imperial China vol. 10 no. 2, December 1989, p. 3. See also Dorothy Ko, "Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China," in Late Imperial China vol. 13 no. 1, June 1992, pp. 9-31 For a discussion of this scroll, see Mary Ann Rogers's essay in Barnhart, Painters of the Great Ming, p. 188. The information on her comes from the Liangchao ping-rang lu or "A Record of Pacifying the Land during Two Reigns," compiled by Zhugu Yüansheng in 1606-7 (in Mingdai shiji hui'an, Taipei, 1969), v. 5, pp. 55-64. Her biography is appended to a chapter dealing with military skirmishes between the Ming troops and invading forces. Widmer, Epistolatory World, p. 29. She notes that "most of the gentry women of talent" considered in her study "are presented in at least one biographical notice as unattractive or unfeminine," and speculates that these references to their unattractiveness "may reflect conventional wisdom to the effect that when women of high social status indulged in reading and painting, they lost some of their appeal." Handlin, "Lü K'un's New Audience"; Rowe, "Women and the Family," 26-29. See also Susan Mann, "Women's Learning" (ms.) and "'Fuxue'" Handlin, "Lü K'un's New Audience," p. 24. Ecke, p. 202. Dorothy Ko, book ms., ch. 4 p. 295. Also Lee Waiyee, Writing Women p. 60. Kathy Carlitz, "Desire, Danger, and the Body," in Engendering China, p. 112. She refers there to several other literary cases of Chinese women who lived in disguise as men without compromising their honor, and points out that two of them were rewarded with husbands at the end of their deceptions. Birrell, New Songs, p. 8. Widmer 34, citing Waley 180.

Strictly speaking, Ren Xiong was only in a limited sense Ren Bonian's teacher, since, after meeting the young man in a famous (and perhaps apocryphal) incident, he turned over his further training to his own younger brother Ren Xun, a painter of distinctly lesser talent than either. But Ren Xiong was a major model for Ren Bonian, and the innovator of many artistic motifs and elements of style that the younger master was to develop brilliantly. Ref. to Li Shi's paper, and publication of it in KKPWY yüankan. Yü Chün-fang, "Feminine Images of Kuan-yin," Journal of Chinese Religions 19, Fall 1990, p. 61-89, especially p. 85. Susan Mann, in "Learned Women in the Eighteenth Century" pp. 43-44, writes about women of Ming-Qing times who turned to Buddhism. See Chün-fang Yü, "Guanyin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara," in Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, 850-1850, pp. 151-81, especially 166-69: "Guan-yin as Seductress." A representation of Guanyin with the boy pilgrim Sudhana by the woman artist Jin Liying in which she is portrayed in a manner close to the meiren model is in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou; see [Zhongguo Meishu?] Quanji 10, no. 203. This phenomenon is discussed in my "The Paintings of Liu Yin," pp. 106-109. (Volume ed. by Marasha Weidner) Ref. to Ecke article on her. Xue Susu is probably referring here to the story in the Liexian Zhuan or "Biographies of Immortals" about Npngyü, the daughter of Duke Mu of Qin (7th century B.C.) who married the flautist Xiaoxhi and learned from him to play the flute; their playing together in the Phoenix Terrace was so skillful that it attracted phoenixes, with whom they eventually flew off as immortals. See David Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase, or, Chin P'ing Mei, vol. 1, Princeton, 1994, p. 508-9