This study of “how to” painting manuals takes as its basic inquiry a question formulated by Craig Clunas in his magisterial book on early modern visuality in China (Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997]): what was the social calculus informing picture-making in the Ming dynasty? As J.P. Park puts it, “Through their textual and pictorial guides, [manuals] were designed to meet the public's desire to acquire taste, technique, knowledge, and sensibility, all of which were prerequisites of elite status” (p. 3). He then asks, “Why did it become so important to possess artistic talent in the late Ming?” (p. 4).
What follows is a meticulously researched social history of the content and function of painting manuals published during the forty-year period between 1580 and 1620. Each chapter explores Zhou Lüjing's (1542–1633) multivolume Grove of Paintings (Huasou) and Forest of Paintings...
