James Cahill, one of the foremost authorities on Chinese art, whose interpretations of Chinese painting for the West influenced generations of scholars, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 87.

The cause was complications of prostate cancer, his daughter, Sarah Cahill, said.

Professor Cahill, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965 until his retirement in 1994, was among a group of eminent art historians who, from the late 1950s to the 1970s, researched and cataloged Chinese painting. At the time, Western interest in Chinese art was far less than it is today, said Patricia Berger, professor of Chinese art at Berkeley and one of his former students.

Working with the Swedish scholar Osvald Siren and later on his own, Professor Cahill recorded and photographed Chinese masterworks, building a canon on which to understand the development of Chinese painting over the centuries, Professor Berger said.

In his analysis of paintings, Professor Cahill typically tried to learn as much as possible about the character of an artist from the brushwork. This formal analysis led to an interest in authenticity, a major theme in the study of Chinese art; in China, copying revered works is a tradition, and some copies are regarded as masterpieces in their own right.