18th-Century Prints from Suzhou

China is known for its invention of woodblock printing in the 700s and as a pioneer in color printing with separate blocks in the early 1600s, a technique that had been developed well before it spread to Japan. Color printing reached its peak around the 1700s, and the finest prints were made in Suzhou, in southeast China. Though the CMA has been celebrated for more than a century for our classical Chinese paintings, now we can also illustrate the story of printing in China with the acquisition of 113 Suzhou prints from the prestigious collection of Christer von der Burg. These prints include superb examples of diverse subject matter, format, and size.

These types of prints were preserved as wall decoration in Europe or in collections in Japan; hardly any have survived in China. Today, comparable holdings of such material can only be found in the British Museum, London, and the Umi Mori Art Museum, Hiroshima, Japan. US institutions have sporadically but never systematically acquired Chinese works. The acquisition of these works makes the CMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which purchased another part of the collection in the same sale, top global destinations for the study of Suzhou color prints.

This acquisition transforms the CMA’s Chinese collection by adding in one moment an entirely new genre of artworks in significant number and quality. The prints’ themes include depictions of birds and flowers, antiquities, architecture, gardens and famous sites, and fashionable women. Closely associated with and often imitating paintings, the prints bring fresh insights, new attention, and a fuller understanding to our eminent Chinese painting collection. Furthermore, the group allows the museum to address China’s invention of printing centuries before the accomplishments of Johannes Gutenberg (died 1468) and highlights the development of color printing, both innovations of global importance that have changed the world.