1633
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Ten Bamboo Studio Painting and Calligraphy Handbook (Shizhuzhai shuhua pu): Bamboo is a 1633 by Hu Zhengyan, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a single stalk of bamboo, leaves sharp as knives, printed in soft greens and blacks. This isn’t just a drawing—it’s a page from a 1633 how-to book for artists. The printer used layered woodblocks, each inked a different color, then pressed in perfect order. The result looks like watercolor, not print. If you like how the ink bleeds at the edges, look up *sfumato*.
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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