Pounding Tea Leaves and Forming Tea Cakes
1800
paint
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1800
paint
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Dominant colour
Pounding Tea Leaves and Forming Tea Cakes is a 1800 paint by Unknown, a Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
You see a man pounding tea leaves and trays filled with tea cakes in this painting. The painting is part of a set showing the tea industry in China. It was made for Europeans who wanted to know how tea was grown and processed. This painting is similar to works that use technique like impasto, but to learn more about that, look up the technique: impasto.
A rectangular watercolour painting from around 1800 depicts five adults and a child processing tea, with figures pounding tea leaves and arranging trays of formed tea cakes. Part of a twelve-piece set illustrating the Chinese tea industry, the work reflects Europe’s interest in understanding tea production before China’s monopoly ended in the mid-1700s. The scene captures the manual preparation of compressed tea for export. The painting was donated by Mrs. L. MacKenzie in 1894.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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