Professor James Cahilll, a renowned historian of Chinese art, passed away at 2 pm, February 14, in his home in California at the age of 87. Born in Fort Bragg, California in 1926, James Cahill was Professor Emeritus at the History of Art department at the University of California, Berkeley; he was also the recipient of the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for writing on art, as well as the Charles Lang Freer medal, established by the Smithsonian institution. He was also once the Curator of Chinese Art at the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC.
Professor Cahill’s research focused mainly on Chinese painting and calligraphy, with notable works including Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty, 1279–1368; Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570–1644; The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting, among others, which have all been translated into Chinese. Academically, Professor Cahill was noted for his integration of sociology and art history, as well as Western art historical connoisseurship with traditional Chinese connoisseurship. At one point, Cahill argued against Professor Wen Fong of Princeton University about the analysis of style; the two engaged in a vigorous and well-publicized debate over the authenticity of “Riverbank”, attributed to Dong Yuan and collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His later projects included video lectures on Chinese painting from the distant past through to the Song dynasty, available for viewing on his website, jamescahill.info.
His marriages to Dorothy Dunlap and Hsingyuan Tsao (a historian of art and an art critic) ended in divorce. He is survived also by his four children from the two marriages.
Professor James Cahilll.高居翰教授
