1633
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Ten Bamboo Studio Painting and Calligraphy Handbook (Shizhuzhai shuhua pu): Fruit is a 1633 by Hu Zhengyan, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a bright orange persimmon, a green pear, and a brown chestnut on a plain sheet of paper. This is from a 1633 handbook that taught artists how to paint. The colors were printed from carved wood blocks, one for each shade. The blocks had to line up perfectly—no smudges, no gaps. It’s like a coloring book made 400 years ago, but the results look fresh and real. If you like how the fruit glows, look up *sfumato*—a technique that softens edges the same way.
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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