BIO

James Cahill took his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1958, and was Curator of Chinese Art at the Freer Gallery of Art from 1958. In 1965 he moved back to Berkeley, to teach there until his retirement in 1995. For the 1978-79 academic year he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, delivering a series of lectures that appeared in 1982 as a book (The Compelling Image) which in the following year won the College Art Association’s Morey Prize for the best art history book of 1982 The College Art Association awarded him its Lifetime Distinguished Teaching of Art History award in 1995, and at its 2004 annual meeting devoted a Distinguished Scholar session to him. He lives now in Vancouver with his wife Hsingyuan Tsao and their ten-year-old twin boys Julian and Benedict. He continues to publish and lecture widely; a book in press is Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China. 

Selected Publications: Books

Chinese Painting.  In:  Treasures of Asia series, Editions d'Art Albert Skira, Geneva,1960. 

Hills Beyond a River:  Chinese Painting of the Yüan Dynasty, 1279-1368.  Tokyo and New York, John Weatherhill, Inc., 1976.

Parting at the Shore:  Chinese Painting of the Early and Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368-1580.  Tokyo and New York, John Weatherhill, 1978.

The Distant Mountains:  Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570-1644. Tokyo and New York, John Weatherhill, 1982.

The Compelling Image:  Nature and Style in Seventeenth Century Chinese Painting.  Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982 (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures).

Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting, Lawrence, Kansas, Univ. of Kansas, 1988 (The Franklin D. Murphy Lectures).

The Painter's Practice.  How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994 (The Bampton Lectures),

The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1996 (The Reischauer Lectures).

Recent articles:

"The Three Zhangs, Yangzhou Beauties, and the Manchu Court." In: Orientations, October, 1996, 59-68

"Continuations of Ch'an Painting into Ming-Ch'ing and the Prevalence of Type-images." In: Archives of Asian Art L/1997-98, 17-41.

“The Case Against Riverbank: An Indictment in Fourteen Counts.” In: Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999, 12-63.

“Some Thoughts on the History and Post-History of Chinese Painting.” In: Archives of Asian Art LV, 2005, 17-33.