Chinese Literati on Painting

Susan Bush is a research associate at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University.

Bush's book has served as the primary source on the topic of Chinese theories on the art of painting during the era that began with the development of scholar's styles of brush painting. It holds a revered place in the canon of modern Western literature on the subject, and it occupies a reserved place on the shelf of every serious scholar in the field who has managed to secure a copy before it became virtually unavailable about one decade ago. Working often with fragmentary writings and occasional jottings, she has woven these into a coherent account of the development of the Chinese scholars' rationale for painting, in the same way that they had for many centuries before this produced poetry and calligraphy as an outlet for emotional expression and a means of moral self-cultivation. -- Jerome Silbergeld, Princeton University