Gazing into the Past: Shitao's Album for Daoist Yu by James Cahill 6
Channel: Randy Chatterjee
Date: 2015-06-09

This lecture, the sixth in our Gazing Into the Past series, will be devoted mostly to a single album--but one of the great albums in the whole of Chinese painting, and by one of everybody's favorite Chinese painters, Shitao. (We used to call him Daoji, through a misreading of a signature or seal, but that was cleared up: he should properly be called Shitao, or Yuanji--also other names, which don't concern us.) As I mentioned in an earlier lecture: whenever people asked me who my favorite Chinese painter was, I would answer: Xia Gui for the early period, Shitao for the late period. And of all Shitao's works, everybody's favorite--and mine--is the twelve-leaf album he painted in the 1680s or 90s--it's undated--best known as Album for Daoist Yu.
                                             ----- James Cahill