Paintings after Ancient Masters: Volume 1

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.

An album has a vertical, dark brown wood cover displaying a prominent vertical grain. A tan paper label along the left edge is decorated with black ink calligraphy ending with two red square seals. In the bottom left corner sit two small white labels with typed and handwritten text. Thin, cream-colored edges of silk pages peek from the top and right sides of the wood.

Paintings after Ancient Masters: Volume 1

1598–1652

Chen Hongshou

(Chinese, 1598/99–1652)

China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)

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