In 2019, Amy McNair published an annotated translation of the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings (Xuanhe huapu, 1120 CE), an anonymous catalogue of 6,396 paintings that were held in imperial storehouses during the Xuanhe reign period of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125) of the Song dynasty.Footnote ¹ Rather than presenting a classified list of painting titles, the Catalogue takes the form of a biographical compendium. It subjoins the titles of the paintings in the imperial collection to the biographies of the 231 painters to whom it attributes the paintings. The Catalogue divides its biographies into ten categories, placing each painter under the subject matter for which the painter was best known: “Daoist and Buddhist Subjects,” “Figural Subjects,” “Architecture,” “Barbarian Tribes,” “Dragons and Fish,” “Landscape,” “Domestic and Wild Animals,” “Flowers and Birds,” “Ink Bamboo,” and “Vegetables and Fruit.” The list of each painter's works follows this same order of classification, regardless of the painter's topical specialization.

In her introduction to the 2019 translation, McNair observed that the great majority of the biographies in the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings consist of materials digested from compendia on painting dating to the Tang and the early Song. Some other biographies she recognized as fictive, extrapolated by the compilers from the titles of extant works rather than based on documents about painters’ lives. The only materials original to the Catalogue McNair found in thirty biographies that constituted a peculiar group, namely the biographies of fourteen eunuch officials and sixteen members of the imperial clan, all of them alive or recently deceased in 1120.

In the 2019 introduction, McNair wrote that she had discovered nothing to support the traditional attribution of the Catalogue to Emperor Huizong or to those who wrote in his name. She noted that Emperor Huizong appears in the Catalogue only three times, each time observed within the inner palace, receiving a painting from a eunuch official or from a member of the imperial clan. Analysis of the 231 lists of paintings moreover revealed that many consisted of two lists rather than one, the two lists being distinguished by the repetition of the order of the ten subject categories. By examining the provenance of paintings in such double lists, McNair demonstrated that all primary lists (containing a total of some 5,000 titles, or four fifths of the total number of titles in the Catalogue) document paintings that the palace acquired prior to 1100, and that the secondary lists (over 1,000 paintings, one fifth of the total number of titles) document paintings that were either acquired or reattributed during Emperor Huizong's reign. McNair proposed that the primary lists derived from an earlier catalogue of the imperial collection. She concluded that, contrary to received opinion, the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings does not represent Emperor Huizong's taste in painting. Not only did more than 80 percent of the catalogued works enter the imperial collection prior to his reign, but he himself appears in the Catalogue only incidentally, instead of dominating the prefaces and the evaluations with his imperial voice and imperious opinions.

In The Painting Master's Shame, McNair extends and sharpens her earlier analysis of the Catalogue in order to identify its actual author and its true purpose. She argues that it was the powerful eunuch official Liang Shicheng (ca. 1063–1126) who oversaw the compilation of the Catalogue, and that he did so in order to claim for himself and for other eunuch officials the prestigious status of scholar-amateur painter as well as to fulfill his filial obligations to Su Shi (1037–1101), whose illegitimate son he claimed to be. McNair supports her case with strong arguments.

First, as she already demonstrated in the introduction to the 2019 translation, the only unique materials in the Catalogue appear in the biographies of fourteen eunuch officials and sixteen members of the imperial clan. The eunuch officials include Liang Shicheng himself, as well as his adopted brother, the eunuch official Liang Shimin, and his adopted son, the eunuch official Liang Kui.

Second, as director of the Calligrapher Service (Shuyiju) from 1114 to 1121, Liang Shicheng supervised writers who could assist him in the compilation of a work such as the Catalogue. He also had access to inventories of the imperial collection, though not to the paintings themselves.

Third, the dominant theory in the Catalogue is Su Shi's theory of scholar-amateur painting. Although Emperor Huizong had proscribed the writings of Su Shi, the Catalogue quotes and paraphrases Su Shi's words and ideas throughout. It disparages and excludes professional painters, while praising scholar-amateurs who painted only for themselves and for friends, as a means of self-expression.

Fourth, the longest biography by far in the Catalogue belongs to Li Gonglin (ca. 1041–1106), a friend of Su Shi. McNair identifies this biography as “the emotional heart of the Catalogue,” because the compilers confess to an explicit effort “to make clear his achievements” (110). They set out to convince the reader that Li Gonglin was not an academy painter, or even “a court official who painted” (111), but a scholar amateur who achieved his reputation by his scholarship, not by a professional skill in painting. This was a personal matter for the compilers of the Catalogue, who compare the three most powerful eunuchs of the time to Li Gonglin: Tong Guan (1054–1126), Liu Yuan (fl. 1093–1112), and Liang Shicheng. McNair proposes that these eunuchs understood the “narreme of the Painting Master” (66)—that is, scenarios in which low official rank left a scholar-amateur painter vulnerable to a degrading command to paint on a commissioned subject—as a metaphor for their own position, in which their unfreedom exposed them to menial tasks and threatened or denied their intellectual and artistic achievements.

Of these four solid arguments, the strangest is also the strongest. Liang Shicheng announced publicly that he was an illegitimate son of Su Shi, in defiance of the avid proscription and prosecution of the so-called Yuanyou faction, which included Su Shi. When, subsequent to this announcement, Liang Shicheng pleaded with Emperor Huizong to relax the ban on Su Shi's writings, he asked, “What was my [late] father's crime?” (93, 178). Liang's determined association with the Yuanyou faction extended beyond rhetoric. He collected calligraphy by Su Shi and paintings by Li Gonglin. He befriended descendants of the Yuanyou faction and acted as their patron while they were banned from office. He addressed the sons of Su Shi as his brothers, “and he particularly befriended and assisted the youngest son, Su Guo [1072–1124]” (179). The descendants of the Yuanyou faction reciprocated Liang Shicheng's attentions, perhaps because the ban left them unemployed and vulnerable. “Su Guo and Fan Wen [a son of Fan Zuyu, 1041–1098] even played the part of family members to the extent that upon the death of Liang [Shicheng]'s wife (née Huang), they attended her funeral and mourned her as though she were their mother” (179). Liang Shicheng's willful cultivation of ties with Su Shi's family and with the descendants of the Yuanyou faction makes him the most plausible compiler of the Catalogue. It is not clear that anyone else possessed either the motivation or the daring to quote and paraphrase the banned writings of Su Shi in a work compiled at Emperor Huizong's own court.

McNair puts forth these arguments in a series of short chapters, each divided into brief sections. A few arguments and examples appear more than once, but the structure of the book is effective, and the treatment concise. The book offers a wealth of historical detail while making its arguments and expositions accessible to non-specialist readers, in a taut 199 pages of text. It accomplishes this in part by strong opening sentences and clear summaries. To cite a few such sentences chosen more or less at random: “Authorship is the most vexed issue for the Catalogue” (45). “For artists about whom there was no record, the writers had to manufacture biographies” (74). “One of the most startling aspects of the Catalogue is the appearance of quotations from Su Shi, promoting the ideal of the scholar-amateur painter” (92). “No other text on Chinese painting before or after the Catalogue has so many entries on eunuch official painters” (136). “Liang Shicheng must have had considerable skill at calligraphy because his first known posting was to the Calligrapher Service” (165). The summary, in the epilogue, of the main arguments of the book is exemplary in its clarity and concision. It reads, in part:

On a few points, The Painting Master's Shame may be too concise. First, the biographies of the sixteen members of the imperial clan receive little attention. Did these persons belong to a specific branch of the imperial clan or stand in a particular relationship to Emperor Huizong or to eunuch officials? Did they support the Yuanyou faction, as Liang Shicheng did? Second, that the primary lists of paintings attached to painters’ biographies use the same ten categories of subject matter, in the same order, as the chapters and the secondary lists in the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings suggests that the Catalogue not only copied the primary lists from an earlier catalogue, but also adopted the format of that catalogue—a series of biographies of individual painters organized by ten categories of subject matter, with individual lists of paintings appended to them. This raises the question how much of the biographies the compilers of the Catalogue copied from that earlier inventory and how much they digested themselves from older texts on painting. Third, The Painting Master's Shame mentions that previous scholars have interpreted the Catalogue as evidence of Emperor Huizong's taste in painting, but it does not explain whether the reattribution of the Catalogue to Liang Shicheng requires a correction of the scholarship on Emperor Huizong's tastes and patronage. These are not structural shortcomings. Answering these challenges and supplying these omissions would probably strengthen the argument of the book, not change it.

In The Painting Master's Shame, Amy McNair presents a convincing new interpretation of a well-known, important text. In the process, she offers an intimate sense of the ambitions and frustrations of powerful eunuch officials at the court of Emperor Huizong. The book shows, for example, that the castration of eunuchs, rather than cutting off the family line, in fact caused a proliferation of fathers, brothers, and sons, through legal, professional, and aspirational adoption. It also shows that by 1120 Su Shi's theory of scholar-amateur painting had become sufficiently recognizable and sufficiently prestigious to be misinterpreted and appropriated. McNair has made an important contribution to political history and the history of art during the Northern Song. The book will be of interest not only to historians and art historians of the Middle Period, but also to scholars of court culture and of eunuchs in other periods and in other parts of the world. Comparative scholars, especially, will be grateful for the clarity and the vivid detail with which McNair has written up her discoveries.