Painting and commerce in Northern Song dynasty China, 960-1126

If socio-economic approaches in Western art studies have been "old hat," they are still very young for the field of Chinese painting. This dissertation is the first serious study of the impact of socio-economic factors on Chinese painting from the late tenth to the early twelfth century, historically known as the Northern Song period, on the basis of research into contemporary textual and visual evidence.; Northern Song dynasty China had the most developed economy in the medieval world. The "commercial revolution" transformed both the political and pictorial landscape. Economic changes also led to an expansion in the Song repertoire of genre subjects drawn from everyday life and encouraged the development of specialization in the art of painting. Paintings became a commodity and a market infrastructure developed for the sale and collection of artworks.; This dissertation studies the changes brought to style, iconography and visual skills by new social, economic, and technological developments of the period. Issues of examination include painting and collecting as socio-economic practices and contextual reconstruction of a group of visual examples from the commercial revolution--water-mills, wine shops, boats, bridges, cities, street markets, and commercial traffic. Departing from what we already know, this study explores how socio-economic factors contributed significantly to the making of Song art and experiments with fresh angles to see Song painting as a landscape of economic life.