Page 62 - Chinese Decorative Arts: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 55, no. 1 (Summer, 1997)

Inkstone
i8th
Gu Erniang early century)
(act.
18th
Qing dynasty, century
Limestone
L. 51/8 in. (13 cm)
Hasting, 1989
Gift of Lily and Baird
1989.99.1a,b
Gu Erniang, also called Qinniang or
Qingniang, nee Zou, married into a
family known for inkstone carving since the
early part of the Qing dynasty. The family
lived in Zhuanzhu Alley in Wumen (present-
day Suzhou), which was also the center of
jade carving and the home of Zhu Gui, a
famous woodblock maker. Succeeding her
father-in-law in the family business, Gu
established her own style and passed her skills
on to her nephew. Her works were celebrated
in poems. It is recorded in an eighteenth-
century source that her style was ornate and
that she believed an inkstone should be round
edged, organic, and voluptuous, rather than
lean and hard.
This plump, fleshy, yellow-green stone illus-
trates Gu's ideas on the formal qualities of a
good inkstone. It is irregularly shaped and is
decorated with a phoenix in low relief. An ink/
water well in the shape of a swirling cloud is
carved at the top of the grinding surface. In
the lower left corner of the underside in relief
inside a recessed cartouche is the artist's sig-
nature, reading "Wumen Gu Erniang zhi"
of
(made by Gu Erniang Wumen).
The mannered pose of the phoenix, the
treatment of individual feathers, and the ner-
vous wiggles of the tail plumage agree with the
"ornate" attributed to Gu's works. The
quality
density of details and the spatial compression
of the shallow relief are strikingly similar to
the surface of a printing block. The reliance
on linear rather than sculptural articulation is
also standard vocabulary in woodblock illus-
trations, and it is possible that Gu's carving style
was influenced her familiarity with wood-
by
block techniques. WAS

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