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Fascination of Nature
Natural History, July, 2000 by Roderick Whitfield
Toward the end of the Yuan dynasty, scholar-painters moved on to landscape painting and calligraphy. But the established repertoire of plants and insects, brought to vivid life in the Robinson Scroll, had found its niche. In succeeding dynasties, artists working in a new genre--the decorative blue-and-white underglaze painting of porcelain vessels--continued to render leaves, flowers, insects, and animals in minute and accurate detail.
Roderick Whitfield ("Fascination of Nature"), who holds the Percival David Chair of Chinese and East Asian Art at the University of London, attributes his early captivation with China to his parents. "My mother was a bookbinder and weaver," he explains, "and my father a distinguished scholar of Italian literature. Both were fascinated by Chinese art." Home-schooled until age eleven, Whitfield (pictured here with his father) holds degrees from London, Cambridge, and Princeton universities and is fluent in French, Italian, and Mandarin. His book Fascination of Nature: Plants and Insects in Chinese Painting and Ceramics of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) was published in Seoul, South Korea, in 1993 by Yekyong Publications.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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