In James Cahill’s own words, the goal of Pictures for Use and Pleasure is to facilitate “further, deeper, and altogether better studies” of the proposed category of vernacular paintings (199). The interest is in finding, sorting, and identifying such paintings according to their subject areas; in making (corrective) attributions with suggested dates, artists’ names, and styles; and in offering interpretations with respect to function, aesthetic concern, and regional variation. The paintings studied were kept mostly in the private quarters of elite households, the inner and secondary palace complexes, and in urban places of pleasure frequented by male elite. Their artists are identified mostly with four dominant urban centers—Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Yangzhou—in the historical period that comprises the successive reigns of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors. Beginning in 1662 and ending in 1795, the period is referred to, according to different discursive conventions, as “High Qing” and the “long eighteenth century.”

(Full disclosure: I received an MA with Professor Cahill and took his classes, in which some of the issues discussed in the book were explored and presented.)

The second stated purpose of the book is to help “erode” the “dogma of traditional Chinese literati-painting theory,” the perceived troubling bias that has been framed and sustained by the preference both for literati values in the Chinese art-historical discourse and for literati paintings in collecting practice. Cahill begins by noting that the aftermath of his PhD dissertation (1958) on the Yuan literati artist Wu Zhen sowed the seed of a long-term interest in topics other than literati paintings and artists. Nevertheless, the specter that is the monolithic “dogma” (still) seems to be hovering over and permeating Pictures for Use and Pleasure, subversively manipulating for attention in the beginning of some chapters and making its presence felt intermittently in discussions throughout the text.

Overall, the book rehearses and further develops points of interest, ideas, and concepts that Cahill has been raising, deliberating, and presenting in exhibition catalogues, articles and essays, lecture series, and books during the last forty years or so, and which are intended to expand the boundaries of, or to add to “the diversity of ways or modes” in, the practice of art history, particularly in the area of Chinese paintings. For example, in The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), based on his Norton Lectures at Harvard University, three of the six chapters are devoted to the non-literati or “scholar-professional” painters (to borrow a term from Stephen Little), such as Zhang Hong, Wu Bin, and Chen Hongshou. In that book, Cahill explored techniques of representation used by Wu Bin and other landscapists, seen especially in relation to northern European prints and paintings. The significance of Western influence returns as the topic of chapter 3 in Pictures for Use and Pleasure. In considering some later paintings of women, northern European artistic sensibilities are highlighted in the works by Gu Jianlong, Leng Mei, Yu Zhiding, and by a number of anonymous artists. The first of the observed twofold artistic interest is the affect of “three-dimensionality,” achieved by shading and seen in drapery folds on the depicted female subjects. The second is the overall direction toward marked illusionism, rendered as an encompassing compositional strategy that entices and enables readily a viewer’s deep visual penetration into the feminine or erotic space. The artists of vernacular paintings worked, characteristically for extended times or periodically on artistic projects, at the court of the three successive reigns (whether or not in the Imperial Academy therein) while also operating outside the court in urban centers, as independent professionals, in the “‘in-and-out’ pattern.”

A defining character of vernacular paintings is function, namely the purpose and the occasion, or the circumstances, for and in which individual paintings are painted. Cahill has explored this aspect of paintings in two earlier studies, both publications resulting from prior lecture series: Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Paintings, based on the Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), and The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), based on the Bampton Lectures at Columbia University. In his latest book, the attention paid to function has a broadened thematic range, including the tropes of family and of the seasons, established rituals and practice associated with the court, narrative in different literary genres, and women placed in a particular context. Also considered are the locations of paintings (private space in the elite and imperial households, “bordellos,” and places associated with courtesan culture), the ways the paintings were arranged/hung in private spaces, the gender of the viewer, and the likely uses of the images (taking into account their “expressive and erotic effects” associated with courtesan culture, labeled by Cahill as “cool to warmer” and “hot” [25, 129, 162, and 175–91, for a discussion]).

The overall interest in non-literati paintings/artists and consideration of the importance of issues about the function of paintings, namely the two related points explored in the earlier studies, have coalesced in the conceptual formulation of vernacular paintings proposed in Pictures for Use and Pleasure, which is derived from Cahill’s Getty lecture series in 1994, “The Flower and the Mirror: Representations of Women in Late Chinese Painting,” at the University of Southern California. (For the relatively long lag time between the lectures and the book, see page 3 and note 3, 216.) In Cahill’s formulation, the functionality that serves as the distinctive benchmark of vernacular paintings is posited as “the other” of literati paintings. (“Vernacular paintings, then, had several counts against them in the critical system that dominated Chinese connoisseurship and collecting. They were openly functional, in a culture that professed to despise functionalism. They were in the wrong styles, executed in ways that did not prominently display the hand of the artist in personalized brushwork” [3–4].) Thus, vernacular paintings may overlap with, or they may even be synonymous with, “professional paintings,” as the familiar formula of the “two traditions of paintings” is revised to become the “literati and vernacular paintings.”

As an important subcategory of vernacular paintings, meiren hua, or “beautiful-woman painting,” has been subject to the same bias, in favor of literati paintings. The interest paid to these paintings that began in Cahill’s work with graduate students on the 1971 exhibition (and its catalogue) The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period (James Cahill, ed., The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period, Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1971) has expanded to the identities and professional practice of their artists, whose paintings are observed to be “so marginalized as low-class.” Cahill explains that it was the misidentification, “in an interpolated inscription with a spurious signature,” of the painting of a beautiful woman in the exhibition that sparked an early interest in the subject. He recalls his concern with and the discussion of, in that time, the two terms for the category paintings of women. The first term is “meiren hua or ‘beautiful women painting’—a picture, that is, of a beauty as a type, not of any individual person.” The second term is shinü hua or “paintings of gentlewomen” with the connotation of lofty sensibilities, used by “Chinese writers on painting” (2). However, there is no attempt to consider any further distinction between or the commonalities shared by the two terms, in usage, except for the recalled remark made in that time, “that we ‘cannot even tell the portraits from the pin-ups’” (2). The term meiren hua is used more or less throughout the book. Should paintings of meiren hua then be identified with courtesan culture? (“Many of the paintings treated in the book can best be situated and understood in the context of this courtesan culture” (150).) Under the circumstances, it may be worth paying attention to the two terms, informed by a short study on the subject by Shan Guoqiang, “Gudai shinü hua suotan (Miscellaneous talk on ancient shinü hua)” ([Beijing] Palace Museum Journal 2 (1981): 44–48).

The two terms of designation (meiren or meinü hua and shinü hua) have been used more or less interchangeably since the early twelfth century. The term shinü hua emerged in the first half of the ninth century, and meiren hua, the early twelfth century. By the time of the latter, both terms pointed to a similar artistic emphasis on physical and visible ideals of depicted female subjects, seen in their facial and body features, clothes, gestures, and demeanor. Moral virtues of the subjects represented in the paintings, embodied directly in the term shinü hua, were largely vacated in the twelfth century. (As corollary, the artistic emphasis on the physical appearances of women seen in paintings may be an index of the overall importance of representationalism, or the fit between form and ideal content, seen also in the familiar monumental landscapes, in Northern Song.) In the two terms of designation of paintings of women, their respective (etymological) nuances, whether concerning the moral virtues and social status of the women depicted (shinü hua) or their pleasing physical appearances and demeanor (meiren or meinü hua), are more referential than denotative. Put another way, the implicit associations of the terms are projected to be the general aspects concerning women in the individual paintings, aspects that are both inflected by overarching gender concerns in society and narrated in literary writings, in particular historical times.

Cahill proposes an interesting, albeit probably untenable, analogy between vernacular paintings and literary history. He points to a long tradition (until “decades ago”) of considering “non-elite literature,” that is, “vernacular or popular literature” (along with “non-elite paintings”) “too low class or vulgar” for the attention of the male elite (4). However, dramatic plays, novels, and other forms of writing included in the overlapping rubric popular and vernacular literature were of regular interest to the literati in Ming and Qing times (as well as in the earlier Yuan dynasty). Considered sometimes as the exemplary literati artist, Dong Qichang had an informed interest in different genres of drama and novels, including Jinping mei (The plum in the golden vase). This novel and three others, Sanguozhi yanyi (Romance of the three kingdoms), Shuihu zhuan (Water margin), and Xiyou ji (The journey to the west), different versions of which have been in circulation from before the sixteenth century, are referred to as “the four masterworks of Ming fiction” (Andrew Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch’i-shu, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Contemporary literary historians refer to the four Ming works together with three later novels, dated from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Rulin waishi (Unofficial history of the forest of scholars [ca.1750]), Yesou puyan (Humble words of a rustic elder [ca. 1780]), and Jinghua yuan (Flowers in the mirror [ca. 1821/1828]) as “literati novels” (Stephen Roddy, Literati Identity and Its Fictional Representations in Late Imperial China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). The novels refract and narrate the intellectual concerns and issues of identity of the literati primarily both in the sixteenth century and from the late eighteenth through the first half of the nineteenth centuries.

Despite quibbles over conceptual matters regarding both the designation of paintings of women and the term adopted for the proposed vernacular paintings, Pictures for Use and Pleasure is an important book. By opening up the subject of paintings of women and pointing to possible ways for further engagement, Cahill draws attention to a category of paintings that have hitherto been little studied. The book provides rich discussions on diverse matters in a way that lends itself to the analogy of centrifugal force. The discussions together with the extraordinarily large number of illustrations (mostly in color) that show women in different settings, painted by a range of artists (with names that are known or not), and which are in private and public collections, may also have a sobering effect. We are reminded of the overall contingent status of art-historical studies that have been shaped by extant materials and the all-too-familiar assumptions and methodology. In a critical discussion on the sustained importance of “causality” and of the “evidential” nature of artworks as historical documents in the consideration of “legibility” within the field, Donald Preziosi comments that, “Characteristically, disciplinary practice was devoted to reconstructing the elusive ‘realities’ of such ambient forces—from the intentions that might be ascribed to an individual maker, to more general historical forces or circumstances. In short, the principal aim of all art historical study has been to make artworks more fully legible [sic] in and to the present” (Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 7; emphasis in original).