Few issues in Chinese art and art history arouse the passions of scholars and the public as readily as debates about authenticity, especially when the work under scrutiny is as critically important as Riverbank, a painting The Metropolitan Museum of Art attributes to the tenth-century landscape master Dong Yuan (active 930s{u2013}60s). If either of these claims{u2014}that it is a product of the tenth century and is by the hand of Dong Yuan{u2014}is correct, Riverbank will call for the rewriting of early Chinese painting history. To support its belief in the veracity of the painting, the Museum recently published the book Along the Riverbank, a study of the documentation and the style of Riverbank that seeks to place the painting in its historical context. This volume, the result of an international symposium of the same name held on December 11, 1999, is published to give a thorough airing to the dissenting opinions about Riverbank held by some leading scholars in the field and to examine the methods by which scholars analyze and interpret Chinese paintings.-- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
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