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“Thirty-Six Views” Receives the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize

Posted On February 02, 2017 | 16:12 pm | by Press | Permalink
Authors Strassberg and Whiteman Recognized for Contribution to Garden History and Landscape Studies

Dumbarton Oaks Publications is pleased to announce that Richard E. Strassberg and Stephen H. Whiteman, authors of Thirty-Six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints, have been awarded the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. The award is given to books that break new ground in method or interpretation and that contribute to the intellectual vitality of garden history and landscape studies. This is a prestigious award, and we could not be more pleased and proud of the volume and the authors who envisioned and created it.

Thirty-Six Views presents for the first time a complete, annotated translation of the Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate for Escaping the Heat (Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi), originally published by the Kangxi emperor in 1712. The emperor published this unprecedented book to commemorate his recently completed summer palace; it contained poems and descriptions of thirty-six of the palace’s most scenic views. He was closely involved in the production of the book and ordered several of his outstanding court artists—the painter Shen Yu and the engravers Zhu Gui and Mei Yufeng—to produce woodblock prints of the Thirty-Six Views, which set a new standard for topographical illustration. He also ordered Matteo Ripa, an Italian missionary serving as a court artist, to translate these images into the medium of copperplate engraving, which introduced this technique to China. Ripa’s hybridized interpretations soon began to circulate in Europe and influenced contemporary aesthetic debates about the nature and virtues of the Chinese garden. This unique artistic collaboration between a Chinese emperor and a western missionary-artist marked a significant moment in intercultural imagination, production, and transmission during an earlier phase of globalization.

Richard E. Strassberg received his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and served as a Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He specializes in traditional Chinese literature, with a particular interest in landscape and garden culture. He has served as an adjunct curator at the Pacific Asia Museum and was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. He is currently a member of the advisory committee for the Liu Fang Yuan Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. 

Stephen H. Whiteman is Lecturer in Asian Art at The University of Sydney, Australia. He received his doctorate in art history from Stanford University and has been the recipient of fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. His essays on garden history and historiography have been published in Ars Orientalis, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, and the anthology Chinese History in Geographic Perspective

Strassberg and Whiteman have been invited to be guests at the Foundation’s 2017 Place Maker I Place Keeper benefit on May 10, where Thirty-Six Views and their valuable contribution to the field will be recognized.