This detailed, beautifully printed volume, while aimed at the needs of an extensive exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, acquires the permanence of carefully researched scholarship about a hitherto neglected aspect of China’s rich embrace of the visual arts. Initial gratitude must go to the principal collector and donor, the late Richard G. Pritzlaff, who in the distant spaces of his New Mexico ranch was initially overlooked by intellectuals he delightfully branded as a “superficial and disappointing lot” (20). Redemption at least partially follows, however, in this work of two scholars from that maligned assembly, authors Jan Stuart, an art historian, and Evelyn Rawski, a historian.

Their writing is about painted portraits and the situation surrounding them, with the recurring thread throughout that leads the image to formal ancestral ritual. A distinction is drawn as early as the Han dynasty between the portrait as a substitute for the corpse (a funeral banner from Mawangdui, ca. 168 B.C.) and ancestral ritual (Ding Lan’s filial piety toward a wooden sculpture of his father in a late Han relief). Later, the informal portrait, marked by positioning or setting, while shown in numerous examples, is not admitted into this formal ritual category. However, “worship” is a somewhat puzzling word too often repeated throughout the text, and the authors’ own early evaluation deserves greater attention. Their description about “ancestors properly cared for” (36) better explains worship as a continuum beyond death that is a source of benefit and support for the living. The history in worship at the highest levels is only cited in late Chinese history, the year 1082, when statues of ancestors were formally introduced into a new imperial hall, the Jingling Palace.

The book is organized into seven essay-type chapters: “Portraiture and Ancient Rituals,” “Visual Conventions in Portraiture,” “Realism and the Iconic Pose,” “Nomenclature, Production, and Documentary Value,” “Portraits at the Qing Court,” “The Identity of the Sitters,” and “Innovation within a Tradition.” Footnotes follow, as well as two appendices comprising other portraits in the Sackler collection, selected brief biographies, bibliography, glossary of Chinese characters, and an index.

The first topic is a historical introduction, and the second follows in offering clues toward understanding what is described as “a strict visual code” (51). The format is always a hanging scroll, the figure is full length, centrally and symmetrically seated, with highly decorated clothing. Focus is on the face: forward gaze, impassive mouth, dignified, detached. Shrouded in stillness, the subject appears removed from worldly activity.

Chapter 3 discusses the historical growth of “realism,” especially in the face. Surprisingly, the authors cite a face discovered on a pottery jar as early as the Majiayao culture of the third millennium B.C. The claim is made, however, following Dietrich Seckel, that only in the Tang dynasty did figures “receive their own faces” (77). Later, the Ming/Qing environment favored “the self,” and realism became a “burning issue” (81), which was the standard expressed in a late sixteenth-century text: “This is really my father” (82). On the other hand, the popularity of physiognomy clearly shifted this “realism” toward the ideal.

The next essay, “Nomenclature, Production, and Documentary Value,” is a valuable account of these issues. It includes a variety of specific Chinese terms. Ideas expand: How close did the artists come to mimesis? Were they painted before death? After death? Are some later copies with alterations? Workshop organization divides the process into the use of a variety of brushes, stencils, and grids for guidance, and pigments on the reverse side of the work for greater richness.

Chapter 5 lands us in the Qing/Manchu court, where the “social milieu” is currently more exactly known. By the time of Qianlong’s sixty-year rule (1736–96) the court was a society that embraced culturally diverse elements. Portraiture takes on fascinating twists. Qianlong may appear as the haloed Bodhisattva Manjusri in Tibetan guise, or alternately, riding a horse in the style of the Italian painter Castiglione—images rather remote from ancestral purpose. Portraits also might be commissioned for heads of state or for meritorious officials. Still, embraced by the walled architecture that divided Bejing in 1648 into an inner and outer city, court regulations are precise. There are three categories of clothing. A list of color regulations is dated 1759. A further designation outlines the social hierarchy of rank defined by badges or squares, a practice carried on from the Ming dynasty.

The titles of the two final chapters, “The Identity of the Sitters” and “Innovation within a Tradition,” appear to speak for themselves. Although helped by inscriptions, ancestral identification is compounded by the number of names an individual might acquire, including those in Manchu. The last chapter carries out a recognized aspect of Chinese painting history, clinging as it does to tradition, but at the same time demanding creative change. In this case the most marked intrusion is the introduction of photography. With the magnet of commerce, workshops were ready to furnish “ancestor” portraits well into modern times.

Such brevities can only suggest the richness of assembled argument, its scholarly probing, which is the more praiseworthy for previous neglect. Yet it is not always an easy read. Since so many of the images do not fit rigid requirements of veneration, a broader approach to portraiture as a whole would be welcome.

To cite an example, the early image of the Mawangdui Marquise of Dai (168 B.C.) is dismissed as a “caricature,” not a “true portrait” (76). This is followed by the admission, however, that her “sumptuously embroidered robe” identifies her status. Is it not exactly such robes, including a headdress, that help us understand the nature and identity of later “ancestor” portraits? More significant, this dismissal too readily neglects the importance of position or pose. The Han image is in profile. But profile, like the later fixed full-face, also conveys a timelessness (as when stamped on a coin). While the scale of the Marquise is small, she is the object of veneration at the center of a powerful yet balanced mythic world. A clearer reproduction of the image would show her faltering, leaning, staff-supported nature, a reflection of failing health fully reinforced by the autopsy undertaken on her well-preserved body. How not see specific “ancestral” preservation?

In turn, the Song is too summarily brushed aside with Su Shi’s prejudice against rigid “form-likeness.” Stiff formality does not exactly fit the two hanging portraits reproduced, Chan Priest Wuchun and Emperor Song Taizu. More important, however, is the broader reality that it was the triumph of the finest mature Song art, both in and out of the Academy, to combine its “realism” with a continuing sense of inner life. More than twenty-five pages later, in an illustration of a Ming Elderly Couple, one can discover a further insight into the Song. It is pointed out that the feature of attendants placed behind the portraits was “a standard practice in twelfth-to-thirteenth century tomb murals” (105).

I point to what seems like an unimportant detail to suggest the difficulties of presenting as segments of divided essays what might naturally form a continuous visual and historical narrative. Excellent though they may be, the result too often reduces the paintings to illustrations discovered only in a rather cumbersome process of page turning. More than the inconvenience, however, is the slighting of clear visual understanding that among such a forest of paintings demands resting for a time on selected individual portraits, thereby affirming or challenging verbal assumption.

A case in point is the stunning image of Beauty Holding an Orchid (92, 96–97, 104). Its triple illustration in full and detail reflects such significance. Yet divided explanations never seem to grasp the whole image. It is relegated to a type shown earlier by a similar beauty in the Sackler collection (25). “Type,” however, does little to define creativity. (How many Madonnas weave their way through the story of Western art?) At any rate, the earlier mentioned painting is rigidly centered in composition and overly dependent on linear intrusions that include a mannered taihu rock supporting waving orchids. All such distraction has been purged from Beauty Holding an Orchid. Now, visual craft and sensibility deny the stereotypical claim: “Surely intended for a male audience that had learned to enjoy women as luxury ‘commodities’” (103). Did women never look at other women or men in admiring respect, with or without stirrings of erotica? No matter a pieced-together technique. The head, as is explained, was for the skills of a special artist, a significance supported here in discovering the altering of an original sketch line. Striking throughout are simplicities and refinements of shape and color. The sharply angled mauve curtain with discreet lozenges of a deeper toned floral pattern, the touch of curtain cord (blue and yellow), a grained wooden frame (she is “windowed” (70), an off-center setting also to be found in a male portrait), the perfect egg-oval of the head floating with its softened features (the authors’ “luminous orb”), jewelry and discreet brocading stunning against the flat black of hair, collar, and garment hem.

Her handheld orchid, too large visually to fit the hair as the authors speculate, is like the rosaries that commonly touch discreet male portrait fingers, a clear sign of character. While flowers both in and outside China readily embody female connotations, highly educated courtesans and certainly palace women were a far cry from “commodities.” Robed in suggestively pure imperial yellow, could not the orchid here signify that rare and hidden fragrance, the boast of lofty men?

Is Worshiping the Ancestors an important book? Yes, but more needs to be done. Nevertheless, the wonder is that we now have so many images confronting us with such compelling presence, and over so many years.