The Chinese art collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is one of the finest outside East Asia, with particularly superb holdings of paintings and ceramics, along with important sculptures, bronzes and examples of the decorative arts. Some 100 objects have been selected here to represent its riches, arranged to explore themes such as religion or the scholar tradition throughout China's long history. The works featured in Arts of China range from Neolithic tomb artifacts to contemporary painting and include exquisite porcelains, paintings, sculptures, lacquerware and metalwork created for worship, court life, foreign trade or everyday use. Many reflect engagement with earlier traditions or with cultures outside China, including those of Central Asia and India as well as Europe and America. Enhanced with illuminating essays, this book offers an ideal introduction to the breathtaking beauty and variety of Chinese art.

"The first publication to explore Philadelphia Museum of Art's wide-ranging collection of Chinese art, offering an introduction to general readers and serving as a valuable resource for future research and scholarship. This catalogue of one hundred highlights, drawn from a collection of more than seven thousand objects spanning more than four thousand years, will be both a sumptuous visual record of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's most notable Chinese works and an informative and valuable reference for those interested in Chinese art. The objects have been selected to show not only the strengths of the collection, but also important and distinctive examples of Chinese art in different mediums. They are also intended to bring together the museum's Chinese collection, which is presently housed in such disparate departments as Chinese export art, costume and textiles, Sino-Tibetan art, and contemporary art--representing sculpture, ceramics, furniture, architectural interiors, textiles, and paintings"--

Excerpt from Antique Chinese Art: Single Colors, Blue and White, Jade, Amber, and Crystal, Including Beautiful Specimens Chosen From the Collection of Yiang-Lin-Sang, the Late Treasurer of the Chinese Empire at Peking and by the Expert Ta-Kee Shanghai; To Be Sold at Absolute Public Sale In the present exhibition collectors and amateurs will find a most beautiful lot of vases and curios for hall, mantel, and cabinet decoration. To the pieces recently received from the collection Of the late Treasurer of the Chinese Empire at Peking, yiang-lin-sang, the selections of the native porcelain expert, Ta - kee, of Shanghai, have been added. The exhibition has much artistic and chronological value. To complete garnitures and balance groups of vases some specimens have been selected from the reserve of my art house, 5 East Thirty-fourth Street, New York. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book tells the story of how and why millions of Chinese works of art got exported to collectors and institutions in the West, in particular to the United States. As China’s last dynasty was weakening and collapsing from 1860 into the early years of the twentieth century, China’s internal chaos allowed imperial and private Chinese collections to be scattered, looted and sold. A remarkable and varied group of Westerners entered the country, had their eyes opened to centuries of Chinese creativity and gathered up paintings, bronzes and ceramics, as well as sculptures, jades and bronzes. The migration to America and Europe of China’s art is one of the greatest outflows of a culture’s artistic heritage in human history. A good deal of the art procured by collectors and dealers, some famous and others little known but all remarkable in individual ways, eventually wound up in American and European museums. Today some of the art still in private hands is returning to China via international auctions and aggressive purchases by Chinese millionaires.