The patronage aspect of Chinese painting began to be explored by art historians in the early 1970s, following an earlier wave of studies of patronage in Western art history. In traditional Chinese writing about art, However, there is no mention of an equivalent term for patron, and the definition of patronage derived from the Renaissance and Baroque art has to be adapted to the unique situations in Chinese painting, in particular, the existence of a dominant amateur tradition in its long history. Nevertheless, in the past two decades or so, patronage study, whose central concern is to address the question of how patronage functions as a factor in the formation of artistic styles or choices of subjects, has proven to be a fruitful approach in the study of Chinese painting. This essay aims to review the major achievements and breakthroughs this approach has brought to our interpretation of Chinese painting and to comment briefly on its limitation. The first part of the essay reviews the studies of imperial patronage, which are further divided into studies of institutions of imperial patronage (in particular the so-called painting academies), of how imperial patronage helped to shape the styles of the court paintings, and of how court paintings became the media of public or personal statements for their imperial patrons. The second part discusses studies of private patronage, including artists or patrons centered studies, as well as devoted to studies that deal with the relationship between the formation of local or regional schools and the regionally based patronage groups.