Tuesday, February 13, 2007

China Girls

China Girl


China Girl a


China Girl b


China Girl b (detail)


China Girl c


China Girl d


China Girl e


China Girl e (detail)


China Girl f


China Girl f (detail)


China Girl g


China Girl h


China Girl i


China Girl j


This exquisite and delicate watercolour album is from Hong Kong. There is very little information available at Carnegie Mellon University's Posner Library website. It mentions that the paintings are by 12 different artists of the 12 beautiful ladies from 'Hung Lou Meng' by Ts'ao Chan. I am presuming, from a further snippet, that the book or story is from the 18th century. The album itself ('Ch‘i lin shih erh chai cheng ch‘eng') was produced in the 20th century (probably early). I count only 11 ladies above. I must have missed one. How remiss of me. I have touched up some background artifact in many of the above images (click for larger versions).

6 comments :

konsumprodukt said...

I love this blog!

allie aller said...

Exquisite!
I found you via Sharon Boggon..and your blog is going straight onto my RSS feed. Thank you so much for this!
~Allie

Susan said...

One you missed:

http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/books/pages.cgi?call=709.51_C28M&layout=vol0/part0/copy0&file=0028

Thanks for pointing me to this collection. It's fabulous!

peacay said...

Aaaaah! The one that got away. She's cute too. I wonder if she has a boyfriend? Yakuza knowing my luck..

peacay said...

That incredibly lame joke might have flown further if Yakuza were Chinese and not Japansese. This is part of the reason why the cute watercolour girls from 100 years ago try to avoid me. So it goes..

Unknown said...

The unwound foot bindings! Some of these illustrations would have been considered quite sexual, especially in conjunction with the text...

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