Enfilade

Bitter Melon in Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting, ca. 1633–1703, woodblock-printed book mounted as album leaves, ink and colors on paper (multi-block technique), published in Nanjing (San Marino: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens).

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Opening next month at The Huntington:

Paintings in Print: Studying Art in China
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 7 October 2023 — 27 May 2024

The exhibition Paintings in Print: Studying Art in China examines the ways painting manuals published in the 17th and 18th centuries used innovative printing methods to introduce the techniques, history, and appreciation of painting to widening audiences in early modern China.

In the 16th century, Chinese publishers began creating educational art manuals filled with colorful prints of paintings and texts on the history and methods of brush arts. The manuals were unprecedented because they taught aspiring painters and collectors from the growing merchant class how to create and appreciate literati art—a combination of painting, calligraphy, and poetry long practiced by elite scholars. Drawing from The Huntington’s collection, the exhibition focuses on two books: The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting and Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting. The books will be displayed together, in their entirety, for the first time in the United States. The texts will be presented in their original form as well as digitized to allow visitors to explore the materials more closely. They will be complemented with paintings—including recent donations from the Berman Foundation—that exemplify how artists studied manuals like these to learn the basics of their art.