In this handsome and lavishly illustrated volume devoted to the Southern Song court painter Ma Yuan (fl. 1190–1230), surely the least studied (and most copied) among Chinese painters so famous, Richard Edwards provides a surpassingly concentrated examination of this artist within the wide-ranging context of late Song culture. At the very outset, we are provided with a firm historical basis for the book's focus on Ma's style (though no such basis is obligatory): Edwards suggests that Ma Yuan's achievement was built upon an artistic concentration that was enabled by the contemporary court structure, whereby painters were not allowed to enter the civil service (based on a decree by Emperor Renzong, r. 1023–63). Thus freed of any opportunity for official promotion, Ma was all the more driven to focus on the perfection of his art (p. 1).
While we might question the extent to which Renzong's 1056 decree influenced the Ma...
