Publisher's Synopsis
Using the Chinese painting collections of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, this book explores pigments in the Chinese palette for paintings on silk and paper from the Song dynasty (960-1279) through the early twentieth century. The first book to bring together information from a large group of paintings-over 200-it presents pigment identifications that provide the physical proof of when and how pigments were used in Chinese paintings. Among the paintings studied are scholar-paintings of several genres as well as portraits.
