[Watercolor Album] Scenes in China

Paintings depicting professions and various other pursuits, customs, etc. 8vo. 26 watercolor paintings pasted onto leaves. Watercolors were executed onto a thin paper and then pasted onto the card. The mounting of the paintings has protected them from tearing and chipping, at the sacrifice of now being subject to the vissitudes of a leaves made of an acidic, or high pulp content, card stock. Also the paste used in mounting appears here and there as a light, spectral presence. Subjects of paintings include such things as a New Year's greeting, the carrying of a bridal chaise chair, a Chinese archer, a Chinese wedding (bride, groom, officiator), the painting of an idol, "idolatrous worship", an itinerant confectioner, silk spinning, a cobbler, tailors, hatters, money changers, street musicians, fortune telling, etc. etc. The women have bound feet, and generally one sees depicted here a China as it was in the mid-19th century. Twelve of the illustrations are fully, richly colored, while the balance of 14 illustrations have partial coloring -- always the flesh is colored in these, with some touches of blue. The artwork is disarmingly naive. We would conjecture that it was created by a Chinese hand, but we cannot say this as a certainty, and we would note that in our handling of numerous pith paper albums, and ones devoted to professions and activities, we had not seen any of the images contained in this album, suggesting the possibility of greater originality by the artist than characterizes other albums of Chinese watercolors from the same time period. The album itself is western made, and is a typical cloth bound scrap book album of the late Victorian period. This one has a color printed illustration of a desert scene as a centerpiece on the front cover -- this has no relation to the contents, nor does any of the blindstamped decoration surrounding it have relevance to the content. The album is lacking a spine, has loose, although not fully detached, boards, and leaves that are highly brittle and heavily toned.