Donald Jenkins

Janice Quivey

Jay Xu

Winner of a Choice Magazine 2006 Outstanding Academic Title Award Mysterious Spirits, Strange Beasts, Earthly Delights features artifacts from one of the most compelling periods in China's early history, the Warring States and Qin-Han eras. They comprise a seven-century span (4th century bce-3rd century ce) remarkable for artifacts of wide-ranging subject matter. Among them are found both imaginative creatures of the supernatural world and realistic images of many objects and artifacts of daily life in the secular world. Here are figures of mythical beasts, dogs, courtly attendants, musicians with their instruments, a chef trimming fish, horsemen, an elaborate watchtower, a pigpen, fanciful trees, game players, wine vessels, and ordinary plates. Some originally afforded luxurious and opulent comforts for the living, or protection and blessing for the deceased. Asian art scholars Donald Jenkins and Jay Xu provide absorbing and lucid overviews of the period and a fascinating discussion of each object. The book offers insights into the interests, concerns, and aesthetic values of the ancient Chinese people.

Early Chinese Art from the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection

Mysterious Spirits, Strange Beasts, Earthly Delights

Timothy Clark

Art Institute of Chicago

Osamu Ueda

Timothy A. R. Clark

Art institute (Chicago, Ill.).

The floating world--the closely related pleasure and entertainment districts of Tokyo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--embodied and idealized fashion, chic, and urbanity for its habituees, and inspired a profusion of woodblock prints depicting renowned courtesans and adored matinee idols. Considered ephemera in their time, these prints are treasured works of art today. In this volume of floating world prints (ukiyo-e), the authors present a selection of Kabuki actor portraits and theater scenes from The Art Institute of Chicago's world-renowned Buckingham Collection of Japanese Prints. Together with interpretive essays that place the prints in their historical and cultural context, the authors offer a catalog of 880 prints, 136 of them in color, containing the most complete and up- to-date information available about each print. Donald Jenkins's essay explains printmaking and explores the lives and milieu of the Katsukawa school print makers. Timothy Clark, in his essay, vividly depicts the world of Kabuki theater and describes a particular production of a popular play, from the vantage points of various participants. Osamu Ueda has provided dates and identification for the subjects of many of the prints in the collection, as well as biographies of the leading Kabuki actors and brief lives of the printmakers of the Katsukawa school.

Print Makers of the Katsukawa School

The Actor's Image

Donald Jenkins

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