Great Qing

Addressing the previous lack of a comprehensive English-language study of Qing painting, art historian Claudia Brown's account ranges from the tumultuous Ming-Qing transition to the end of imperial rule. In response to omissions in previous treatments, she examines major influences shaping the period and explores the relationship between painting and mapmaking, the role of patrons and collectors, printmaking and publishing, religious themes, and Western influences.

With more than two hundred color illustrations, Great Qing highlights fine examples of Qing painting in American museums, works from all regions of China, and paintings by women. Brown's gorgeous, attentively rendered survey covers three centuries of momentous change and is intended for general audiences as well as art collectors, museum curators, and students and historians of Chinese art, culture, and society.

Brown's chapter on women artists is particularly valuable, as it presents one of the most thorough accounts of seventeenth- through twenty-first-century female painters in English. The sheer volume of artists discussed in this work is unprecedented in the field.

If one had to choose an introduction to Qing painting, Brown's Great Qing, with its capacious scope, would be it.