1633
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting is a 1633 by Hu Zhengyan, a Baroque work, depicting Book, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a book of printed pages—each one a small, colorful painting of flowers, rocks, or bamboo. This isn’t just art; it’s one of the first full-color prints in China. The artist carved separate woodblocks for each color, then lined them up perfectly to make the images look painted by hand. It took years to get the colors this bright and smooth. To see how this changed Chinese art, look up the subject *china, qing dynasty (1644–1911)*.
Color printing reached a level of perfection in the early 1600s, as seen in this Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting and the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (printed 1679 and 1701). The painterly quality, precision in registering (aligning) the woodblocks, and harmonious colors made them the most successful color print editions in Chinese history. Both editions were printed and compiled in Nanjing, spread nationwide, and had a great impact on the arts in Japan and Korea.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Hu Zhengyan was a Chinese artist, printmaker and publisher. He worked in calligraphy, traditional Chinese painting, and seal-carving, but was primarily a publisher, producing academic texts as well as records of his own work.
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