A landmark in Chinese colour printing, a classic of the painter's art

Wang, Gai. Jieziyuan Huazhuan Erji [The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. Second Collection].

€ 28,000.00

A fine Qianlong-dated reissue of the most popular section of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual, an instruction manual of Chinese painting technique: the particularly popular second collection devoted to orchids, bamboo, flowering prunus (plums), and chrysanthemums, here preserved in a clear and well-registered impression with subtle colouring.

Issued in eight juan across four volumes, the set is organised as four manuals, each divided into two sections: the first chiefly devoted to method, with text and demonstrations, the second presenting fuller model compositions. It is therefore both a practical handbook and a repertory of finished exemplars for the cultivation of brushwork.

The edition was produced at Jinchang Shuye Tang in Suzhou and is explicitly dated 1782 in the preliminary matter and in later volumes. While the blocks closely follow the celebrated 1701 issue, the colophon describes the edition as recut; the set thus stands at the intersection of faithful transmission and renewed production from one of the most influential printing traditions in Qing art.

The Mustard Seed Garden Manual became the foundational pictorial primer for generations of painters in China and, after its transmission to Edo-period Japan, for Japanese artists as well. The present second collection was especially prized for its treatment of the Four Gentlemen, whose disciplined repertory of forms lay at the heart of literati training and artistic self-fashioning.