1633
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Ten Bamboo Studio Painting and Calligraphy Handbook (Shizhuzhai shuhua pu): Rocks is a 1633 by Hu Zhengyan, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a black rock with soft, layered shadows, printed in delicate blues and grays. This is from a 1600s Chinese handbook that taught artists how to paint. The printer used multiple woodblocks—one for each color—to build up the rock’s shape. The layers line up perfectly, so the colors blend without smudges. It’s like a how-to guide, but the result looks more like a watercolor than a print. Look up *sfumato* to see how Western artists built up soft edges in a similar 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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