Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting

Few issues in Chinese art and art history arouse the passions of scholars and the public as readily as debates about authenticity, especially when the work under scrutiny is as critically important as Riverbank, a painting Metropolitan Museum staff attributes to the tenth-century landscape master Dong Yuan (active 930s–60s). If either of these claims—that it is a product of the tenth century and is by Dong Yuan—is correct, Riverbank will call for the rewriting of early Chinese painting history. To support our belief in the veracity of the painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently published the book Along the Riverbank, a study of the documentation and the style of Riverbank that seeks to place the painting in its historical context. The present volume documents the symposium, "Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting," which has been organized in order to give a thorough airing of the dissenting opinions about Riverbank held by some leading scholars in the field and to examine the methods by which scholars analyze and interpret Chinese paintings. [This book was originally published in 1999 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]