The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection

With over 80 beautiful paintings and calligraphy scrolls, Elegant Gathering features one of the finest collections of Chinese art―inaccessible to the public until now.

The Yeh Family collection―thought to have been begun by Ye Yanlan in the nineteenth century―has lasted a long time. Over the course of China's tumultuous modern history some works were lost or removed from the collection, while new ones were added. But the idea that these paintings and calligraphies constituted a family collection has remained. Now the current caretakers of the collection, Max Yeh and Yeh Tung, have donated more than one hundred thirty works from the collection to the Asian Art Museum, of which the eighty in this catalogue were shown in an exhibition at the museum. These eighty superb examples of Chinese painting and calligraphy date as far back as the seventh century. Included are a number of important paintings by leading artists of the early and mid-twentieth century. These are rare and significant works, but perhaps the collection's deepest meaning lies in its embodiment of values that have endured in China through generations of cultural and political change.

Wen-hsin Yeh is Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley.