Detail: The Chester Beatty Library is delighted to present this major exhibition of thirty-eight paintings from one of the world’s finest collections of Chinese art, the Shanghai Museum. The exhibition includes scrolls and albums by artists active in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties and the early Republican period after 1912. Each of these ‘story paintings’ retells or illustrates a tale from folk and religious lore, oral and official history, poetry or literature. The exhibition is presented through four sometimes overlapping, sometimes interweaving themes, namely ‘crossings’ – stories about exiles, loyalists and rustics; the supernatural world of popular religion; models and exemplars in history; and finally, emperor-concubine and scholar-beauty romances. There are artworks which illustrate texts inscribed on or beside the paintings themselves. In other cases, the stories illustrated are part of oral history, so that the paintings served as visual props for the viewer to retell popular tales. Collectively, these artworks give a taste of China’s rich mythology and lyric tradition, and show how successive generations of artists gave new life to learning, belief and leisure in pictorial images fit for their own times.