James Cahill, Ph.D., is Professor of Art History at the University of California at Berkeley. A native of California, he received degrees in Oriental languages and art history from Berkeley and the University of Michigan, and was for a time Curator of Chinese Art at the Freer Gallery. His numerous writings, both scholarly and popular, include the well-known Chinese Painting (Skira, 1961) and the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth Century Chinese Painting (Harvard University Press, 1982), as well as the two earlier volumes in the present series, Hills Beyond a River and Parting at the Shore.