Ma Hezhi and the Illustration of the Book of Odes is the first comprehensive study of one of the major monuments of twelfth-century Chinese painting. Illustrating the Book of Odes (Shijing), an important Chinese anthology of poetry, the series of handscrolls is the final and most ambitious artistic project by which the emperor Gaozong sought to validate the Southern Song dynastic revival and his own legitimacy.

The scrolls paired the 305 poems of the ancient anthology (reputedly transcribed by the emperor himself) with compositions by Ma Hezhi, a leading figure in the resurgence of classical illustration at the Hangzhou court. The illustrative program of the Odes scrolls, reconstructed here for the first time, is shown to be closely linked with currents in Song intellectual history and literary studies, as well as with politics and art

.

In this study, Julia Murray accounts for all previous scholarship on the Odes scrolls, summarizes the exegetical tradition of the text, and documents its illustration in pre-Song times. She then analyzes the Song emperor Gaozong's patronage of traditional culture as an instrument of statecraft, as well as his development as a calligrapher in this context.

After discussing the life and art of Ma Hezhi, she examines the Odes scrolls in detail and demonstrates that Ma Hezhi conceived the illustrations through his own creative engagement with the poems and commentaries. A systematic and critical connoisseurship is used to identify the "genuine" scrolls, which the author suggests come from a court workshop that executed designs created by Ma Hezhi.

Murray also includes a catalogue raisonne' of all of the scrolls in an appendix and discusses the significance of Ma Hezhi and the Odes scrolls in the larger context of Chinese painting theory.