1633
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Ten Bamboo Studio Painting and Calligraphy Handbook (Shizhuzhai shuhua pu): Round Fans is a 1633 by Hu Zhengyan, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a small, round fan painted with delicate bamboo leaves and a few birds perched among them. This isn’t just a painting—it’s a page from a how-to book for artists, printed in 1633. The colors are layered so carefully that each leaf looks like it was brushed by hand, not stamped from a woodblock. It’s one of the first times color printing in China got this precise. If you like how this blends art and printing, look up *sfumato*—a technique that softens edges, just like the gentle lines here.
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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