The lyric journey

by James Cahill

Poetic paintings - works done in response to lyric poems, or else as pictorial equivalents to them - compose a major category of East Asian art. In this beautifully illustrated book James Cahill looks at three exemplary traditions in this genre, works from three very different times and places, bringing new understanding of the paintings and of the relationship between the art and the societies that produced it. Creating paintings with poetic resonances, sometimes with ties to specific lines of poetry, is a practice that began in China in the eleventh century, the Northern Sung period. Cahill vividly surveys its first great flowering among artists working in the Southern Sung capital of Hangchou, probably the largest and certainly the richest city on earth in this era. He shows us the revival of poetic painting by late Ming artists working in the prosperous city of Suchou. And we learn how artists in Edo-period Japan, notably the eighteenth-century Nanga masters and the painter and hai