This thesis examines the stylistic development of the artist 'Mihr Chand, son of Ganga Ram' (fl. 1759-86), who travelled across northern India in the hope of finding a beneficent patron. The initial hypothesis, which this thesis proposes, is that Mihr Chand's idiosyncratic approach to the established painting tradition earmarked him as the forerunner in the late eighteenth century art scene in Faizabad and Delhi. I suggest that it was Mihr Chand's thirst for new knowledge that prompted the artist to evaluate the visual resources available and assimilate these new techniques within his works rather than a consequence of the influence of his European patron, Antoine Polier. As Mihr Chand primarily flourished in Faizabad (1765-76), in the province of Awadh, I offer a review on the position of the provincial governors, the Nawabs of Awadh, on their role as the initiators of the late Mughal painting tradition during the second half of the eighteenth century in Chapter 1. To provide the context to analyse Mihr Chand's stylistic development, I suggest a revised and expanded art historical framework of the painting tradition that took place in Delhi and Awadh in Chapter 2. This chapter also addresses the issue of European officers, who cultivated and sponsored local artists to produce numerous illustrations and paintings in Faizabad and later in Lucknow. The following chapter outlines Mihr Chand's biographical details and his chronology of style. I develop Mihr Chand's approach to landscape, portraiture, and architectural drawings in Chapters 4-6. The last two chapters question the artist's originality and his direct impact on artists in Faizabad, Lucknow, Delhi, and Jaipur at the end of the eighteenth century

This thesis examines the relationships between image and text in paintings of Chan Buddhist figural subjects from thirteenth and fourteenth century China. Its central contention is that the visual qualities of these paintings, and the lexical content of the inscriptions upon them, made complex allusions to narrative prototypes recorded in hagiographies, as part of the pedagogical practice of the Chan tradition. These narrative allusions communicated religious teachings to the viewer, mediating their relationship to the Chan pantheon of exemplars and eccentrics. This thesis' analysis of the connections between painters, inscribers, subjects and viewers of Chan figure paintings addresses an under researched dimension of thirteenth and fourteenth century Chinese visual culture. By focusing on the Chinese context for the creation and reception of Chan figure paintings, the following discussion offers an alternative to the recurrent framing of these works as precursors to Japanese Zen painting. Instead, this thesis focuses on the distinctive agency of narrative in the reception of these works in a thirteenth and fourteenth century Chinese context. This is explored in six chapters, outlined below. Chapter one surveys modern scholarship on Chan figure painting, problematising its frequent conflation with Japanese Zen art. Chapters two, three and four examine three different narrative themes in Chan figure painting: transitions, interactions, and awakenings. These three chapters show how these visual narrative themes respectively reflected and reinforced the legitimacy, authority and efficacy of Chan's lineages and teachings. The fifth chapter explores the role of inscriptions upon paintings in shaping the Song and Yuan ideal of a Chan abbot, through a case study encomia on Chan figure paintings by Yanxi Guanwen (1189-1263). The final chapter examines the idealisation of the preeminent painter of Chan figural subjects, Liang Kai (late 12-early 13th century), distinguishing between the historic receptions of his attributions in Chinese and Japanese collections.

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The thesis is a demonstration of an integrated methodology in the investigation of Chinese paintings. Section I outlines methods of analysis used by specialists in China, Japan and the West, and proposes their integration. Section II implements the Integrated Methodology in the identification of prime objects in a group of works attributed to Wu Zhen now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Section III presents a systematic method of investigating the non-genuine works, and charts their respective relationships to the prime objects and/or to each other. The findings clarify fundamental issues regarding period styles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and challenge, by implication, long held assumptions of authenticity of a great many works labelled with Yuan dates. They invite a reconsideration of our methodology as well as our basic assumptions of style-images associated with particular masters.

This thesis examines the artistic achievement of the twentieth-century Chinese painter Fu Baoshi 傅抱石 (1904-1965) through his envisioning of a national identity and visual modernity in his academic work and painting during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The focus of this thesis is an analysis of a body of his landscape and figure paintings as well as the art historical writings which he produced in Chongqing during the war. The importance of these works is assessed through an analysis of Fu Baoshi’s early life in Nanchang (1904-1932) and his studies in Japan (1932-1935) which projected a formative influence on his artistic and intellectual development in Chongqing. Fu Baoshi‘s participation in cultural exchanges with Chinese artists and foreign figures in the revitalised artistic community in the war capital Chongqing played a significant role in his artistic evolution and the growth of his reputation in art circles in modern China. His pursuit of a new ideal form of artistic expression through models from the past is epitomised in his figure painting. His Sichuan landscape represents his consummate atmospheric approach which is associated with the wet climate and his structural approach using his innovative brush work known as Baoshi cun 抱石皴.

Cette thèse a pour objet l’analyse sémiologique du Vide dans l’espace pictural du minhwa, genre artistique populaire coréen, et plus particulièrement dans les peintures ayant pour thème le paysage ‘montagne-eau’ du 18e au 20e siècle de l’ère du Chosŏn. Nous étudions cette notion, qui s’est développée à partir des philosophies traditionnelles telles que le taoisme, le bouddisme et le confucianisme par exemple, en la considérant comme l’un des fondements de la pratique de la peinture et de la culture coréenne. De nos jours, le minhwa est devenu un genre reconnu pour sa valeur artistique propre : l’espace pictural du minhwa est un véritable lieu d’expérimentation pour ses styles innovants et populaires tout en conservant des éléments traditionnels imposés par la philosophie esthétique : le thème, ou l’utilisation de la notion de Vide, par exemple. C’est pourquoi nous avons centré notre attention sur les fonctions de l’espace non peint afin d’étudier l’emploi de la notion du Vide, spécifique au genre du minhwa. Dans cette analyse, nous faisons l’hypothèse que la notion de Vide, sous la forme de surface non peinte, est significative en ce qu’elle exerce des fonctions particulières dans l’espace constitué par la peinture. L’étude de cet espace non peint ainsi que d’autres expressions picturales nécessite l’élaboration d’une grille d’analyse constituée de septs critères : elle s’appuie sur des notions philosophiques traditionnelles, comme la ‘voie’ du tao, mais aussi sur d’autres propres à la philosophie esthétique contemporaine, comme la ‘cinquième dimension’ (Cheng), l’‘entre-deux’ (Buci-Glucksman), ou à l’analyse théorique de l’espace (‘cible/site’ de Vandeloise), afin de pouvoir cerner les fonctions et le sens du Vide dans la symbolique de notre corpus. / The purpose of this thesis is to provide a semiological analysis of Void in the pictural space of Minhwa, a Korean folk art genre, most particularly in the landscape paintings with the theme of the 'mountain-water' from the 18th to the 20th century in the Chosŏn era. We study this notion, which has proceeded from traditional philosophies such as Taoism, Buddhism or Confucianism for example, examining it as one of the fundamental principles of both Korean painting and Korean culture. Nowadays Minhwa has become a genre acknowledged for its intrinsic artistic value: the pictural space of Minhwa is a true experimentation field for innovating and popular style founded on traditional elements imposed on by esthetic philosophy: the theme, the scope of the notion of Emptiness, for instance. Thus we have focused on the roles of unpainted space in order to study the ways of the notion of Void specific to Minhwa genre. The hypothesis of this analysis is that the notion of Void visible as an unpainted place is meaningful in so far as it plays some significant roles within the space created by painting. The study of this unpainted space as well as other pictorial expressions requires to produce an analytic grid based upon seven criteria: it relies on traditional philosophical notions such as the one found in Taoism, the “Way”, or the notion of contemporary esthetic philosophy, the “Fifth dimension” (Cheng), the “Entre-deux” (Buci-Glucksman) and or the notion coming from the theoretical analysis of space, “Trajector / Landmark” (Vandeloise) so as to be able to encompass their roles and their meanings within our corpus.

Ma Shouzhen (1548-1604) was a cultured courtesan who lived in the famous pleasure quarter along the Qinhuai River in Nanjing, the southern capital of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). She was talented in dance and music, painting and poetry, and surprisingly for her time, she was also a playwright. Although she was a celebrity of the prolific Nanjing cultural milieu and there is a good corpus of extant material by and about her, the particular contribution of Ma Shouzhen - her character and her work - have been marginalised, or even neglected, by the previous scholarship. This thesis is a cross-disciplinary study of Ma Shouzhen and is the first in-depth scholarly investigation into the entirety of her activities. It employs material and methods traditionally pertaining to the disciplines of sinology, history, art history, literary and drama studies. The thesis has a dual aim: first, to provide a nuanced understanding of the courtesan, her cultural production and social practice; second, to reclaim the agency and legacy of her character within the cultural milieu of late Ming Nanjing and beyond. These aims will be achieved through two main research objectives: (1) recovering and re-evaluating visual and written sources by and about the courtesan; (2) investigating those sources in order to comprehend her modes of self-representation and strategies of self-fashioning, analysed especially through the lens of gender. The main body of the thesis is composed of an introduction, five core chapters, and an epilogue; the chapters are structured so as to provide as complete a picture of Ma Shouzhen as possible. Chapter Two explores the space of the pleasure quarter, Ma’s biography and its entwinement within the complexities of the historical moment. Chapter Three focuses on her painting, Chapter Four considers her poetry, and Chapter Five explores her theatre practice; Chapter Six extends the investigation to focus on the construction of Ma’s historical character in later decades. In its content and aims, this thesis contributes to women’s and gender history, as well as to studies in visual culture and literature.