This detailed, beautifully printed volume, while aimed at the needs of an extensive exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, acquires the permanence of carefully researched scholarship about a hitherto neglected aspect of China’s rich embrace of the visual arts. Initial gratitude must go to the principal collector and donor, the late Richard G. Pritzlaff, who in the distant spaces of his New Mexico ranch was initially overlooked by intellectuals he delightfully branded as a “superficial and disappointing lot” (20). Redemption at least partially follows, however, in this work of two scholars from that maligned assembly, authors Jan Stuart, an art historian, and Evelyn Rawski, a historian. Their writing is about painted portraits and the situation surrounding them, with the recurring thread throughout that leads the image to formal ancestral ritual. A distinction is drawn as early as the Han dynasty between the portrait as a substitute for the corpse (a funeral banner from Mawangdui, ca. 168 B.C.) and ancestral ritual (Ding Lan’s filial piety toward a wooden sculpture of his father in a late Han relief). Later, the informal portrait, marked by positioning or setting, while shown in numerous examples, is not admitted into this formal...