UCLA

This thesis examines how Pan Jingshu 潘靜淑 (1892–1939) became visible as a painter, collector, and participant in antiquarian textual culture. She was born into the Suzhou Pan family, a lineage distinguished in the late Qing for its collections of rare books, epigraphic materials, and ancient bronzes. The study centers on three works she created with her husband Wu Hufan 吳湖帆 (1894–1968) in 1936–37, Tianzhong xiaojing 天中小景 (Small Scene for the Tianzhong Festival), Suichao tu 歲朝圖 (Painting of the New Year’s Morning), and Qihou hu bu yulan tu 齊侯壺補玉蘭圖 (Painting of the Hu Vessel of the Marquis of Qi Supplemented with Magnolia), in which her flower painting is brought into the genre of bogu qinggong 博古清供 (antiquities and pure offerings), where blossoms appear among ancient vessels, rubbings, seals, and colophons. Through close analysis of these paintings and their inscriptions, the thesis argues that Pan’s authorship took shape through three interlocking practices. Her citation of the earlier women painters Chen Shu 陳書 (1660–1736) and Jiang Jixi 蔣季錫 (fl. 1661–1735) placed her within a distinguashable genealogy of female accomplishment. Her handling of rare books and heirlooms inherited from her natal family bound that lineage to the antiquarian past. And her self-narrative and archival endeavor on a revised epigraphic catalogue record the processes by which she selected, edited, marked, and preserved these materials for transmission. By situating women’s artistic creation beside the male-coded traditions of collecting, epigraphy, and connoisseurship, this thesis shows that Pan’s authorship was neither conferred by marriage nor recovered against it, but constructed through image-making, kinship transmission, and textual preservation, and fixed in the material forms that carried it forward.