1 Guan Daosheng and the Idea of a Great Woman Artist Jennifer Purtle W omen artists in male-dominated societies are only exceptionally—if ever—recognized for their talent. It is not so much the case that such societies are necessarily prejudiced against female artists. Rather, the unique ability of female bodies to bear children gives form to women’s lives, the demands of child-rearing (and more generally, of household management) precluding sustained engagement with the arts. Even when wealth makes possible equal access to education and a well-staffed household, the responsibilities of wife/ mother/chatelaine offer conditions for the practice of art different from those available to her male counterparts. Pressure to conform to expectations about gendered behaviour may further shape the possibilities for women artists in male-dominated societies, foremost among them normative notions of gender and agency: men invent while women reproduce; men read and write while women listen and perhaps speak; men are visible and act in the public sphere while women are correspondingly absent from it, the propriety of an elite household such that its inner workings, especially the non- normative ones pertaining to its female members, would be unknown beyond its walls. In China under Mongol rule, Guan Daosheng (1262–1319) rose to prominence as a woman artist, recognized for her talent and for her selective adherence to—and simultaneous deviation from— expected gender stereotypes. Members of her natal family, which lacked sons and in which Guan therefore acquired both more education and greater filial responsibility than usual for a female child, were the first audience for her skills. Then, as the wife of the statesman and artist Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), who was her creative collaborator on any number of occasions, her marital family, including her talented sons Zhao Yong (1289–after 1360) and Zhao Yi (act. 14th century), bore witness to her artistic abilities, which, like her competence in estate management, lay outside Confucian prescriptions for wifely and maternal conduct. Indeed, in his epitaph for Guan, which appears in his Collected Works (Songxue zhai wenji), Zhao praised her for these gifts, which may not have been so highly esteemed by men of the period who upheld more traditionally Confucian values. Beyond her families, men active in the literati social networks in which Zhao Mengfu and their sons circulated either knew or knew of Guan Daosheng’s artistic abilities, which were unusual if not transgressive for the time, as she noted in her colophon to a now-lost painting of 1301. Moreover, sources suggest that at the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) court, where Zhao Mengfu served as an official and where Mongol and other non-Chinese customs flourished, aristocrats of both sexes prized her work, a phenomenon perhaps made possible by behavioural standards more supportive of the visibility and agency of women than those of their Confucian counterparts. Indeed, the only extant authentic painting by Guan Daosheng, Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain of 1308 (Fig. 1), bears an inscription that indicates its recipient was another aristocratic woman, the Lady of the Qu Kingdom. This article suggests that the idea of ‘a Great Woman Artist’ (Nochlin, 1988) arose and persisted in China because complex, if not anomalous, expectations about women’s conduct during Mongol Yuan rule made it possible for Guan WOMEN IN ASIAN ART