Bitter Songs and Poetic Images: An Introduction to Susan Bush's "Mi Youren's and Sima Huai's Joint Poetry Illustrations"

Susan Bush's article here and Peter Sturman's article, "Family Matters: The Poetic Ideas Scroll Attributed to Mi Youren and Sima Huai," recently published.2 Archives of Asian Art previously published an important article lamenting the decline of connoisseurship in our age and two rejoinders. 3 These two articles by Bush and Sturman demonstrate that even if the decline of Chinese connoisseurial study is real, the death knell for it has tolled much too soon for such an essential aspect of the discipline. [...]Bush and Sturman agreed decades ago that both paintings in this scroll might be by one artist but disagreed about which one: [...]both authors have explained the imagery of these paintings and the context of their production as an artistic engagement with the conditions of scholarly service in this most troubled period of Song history.