James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

9/3/07. Two more items have been added to the "Writings" section of my website, both of interest chiefly to people who may want to follow up, as researchers or just out of interest, on my paper "Paintings for Women in Ming-Qing China?" published in Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China, vol. 8 (2006), 1-54. (Note: the original Nan Nü publication, through a publisher's error, lacked the color illustrations, which were later sent separately in a packet to subscribers. Library copies may be missing them. I have a number of disks with these color illustrations digitized on them, and can send one to anyone who mails me a self-addressed padded disk envelope and a request: serious users only, please.) A Chinese translation of this article was published in Yishushi Yanjiu (The Study of Art Hitsory), vol. 7, 1-37. As I told Harriet Zurndorfer (editor) and Paul Ropp (advisor) when they urged me to publish this, I meant it only as a preliminary form of something I intend(ed) to write up at greater length and in greater depth at some time in the future. For that purpose I kept a file of notes and references to be used in that expanded version; It contains a number of important leads for carrying the theme in new directions. I also kept a separate file titled "Suzhou/Women" listing relevant paintings, those with the subjects I meant to treat, as painted by Suzhou artists (and a few others). This is, in other words, follow-up and expansion material for my all-too-brief study. Uncertain now about when and whether I will write the longer version, I put these notes and picture references on the website for anyone who wants to use them. Send me a copy, please, of whatever you do that utilizes them.

I mentioned somewhere that two-and-a-half chapters from my projected Early Qing volume were on my website. Two are under Writings as Early Qing 1 and 2; the half chapter, on Nanjing painters of early Qing, is under the CLPs, as CLP 154.

We have been having a lot of problems of format, due to the difference between the Microsoft Word program in which I typed the texts and the language of the internet; much is lost in the translation. In the WCP lectures, all spacing, all underlining, all boldface etc. have disappeared, leaving only huge unbroken paragraphs, hard to read. Barry has been working on this, and we will try to have them easier to look at and read before long. Also, both the newly-added sections described above, WP Notes and Suzhou/Women, have come through with everything underlined. Please be patient and put up with these faults.

James Cahill