Paintings after Ancient Masters

The twenty paintings in this double album by Chen Hongshou include landscapes, figures, and flowers. It also has one leaf featuring a woman, an often-used subject not found in the other albums from the latter part of his career. His late works are wonderful summations of Chen's peculiar and quirky art—archaistic, hyper-refined—but without accompanying shallowness or sentimentality.

His figures and landscapes in the late albums are miniaturized, not unlike the small Chinese gardens, or the carefully selected small table rocks or old roots used for contemplation to see the world in miniature. This loss of scale is quite deliberate and reflects the psychological situation of a depressed class like the Ming loyalist officials and scholars, deprived of their integrity and honor, and forced to lead a diminished and restricted existence.

A vertically oriented rectangular wood album cover features a dark brown, striated surface with a rich vertical grain. On its left, a long tan paper label is inked with thick, black Chinese calligraphy. A small square red stamp sits at the bottom of this band. Two small white stickers are attached in the lower left corner, containing printed and handwritten English metadata. The board's edges are slightly rounded.

Paintings after Ancient Masters

1598–1652

Chen Hongshou

(Chinese, 1598/99–1652)

China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)

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