Painting and Private Life in Eleventh-Century China: Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin by Robert E. Harrist Jr.
4to. pp. xvii, 164 + plates. 41 illustrations. bibliography. index. hardcover. dw. (fine condition). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
ISBN-10: 0691016097 / ISBN-13: 9780691016092
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In the eleventh century, the focus of Chinese painting shifted dramatically. The subject matter of most earlier works of art was drawn from a broadly shared heritage of political, religious, and literary themes. Late in the century, however, a group of scholar-artists began to make paintings that reflected the private experiences of their own lives. Robert Harrist argues here that no work illuminates this development more vividly than Mountain Villa, a handscroll by the renowned artist Li Gonglin (ca. 1041-1106). Through a detailed reading of the painting and an analysis of its place in the visual culture of Li's time, the author offers a new explanation for the emergence of autobiographic content in Chinese art.
Harrist proposes that the subject of Li's painting--his garden in the Longmian Mountains--was itself a form of self-representation, since a garden was then considered a reflection of its owner's character and values. He demonstrates also that Li's turn toward the imagery of private life was inspired by the conventions of Chinese lyric poetry, in which poets recorded and responded to the experiences of their lives.