1633
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Ten Bamboo Studio Painting and Calligraphy Handbook (Shizhuzhai shuhua pu): Birds is a 1633 by Hu Zhengyan, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a small, bright bird perched on a bamboo stalk, leaves curling around it. This isn’t just a painting—it’s a print from a 1633 handbook that taught artists how to paint. The colors are layered like watercolor, but each shade was pressed from a separate woodblock, all lined up perfectly. It’s one of the first times color printing in China looked this smooth and alive. If you like how this feels like a painting but isn’t, look up *sfumato*—the technique of blending colors so softly you can’t see the edges.
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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