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Chinese Huxian Pomegranate Harvest Folk Painting browse these categories for related items... All Items: Chinese: Folk Art: Primitive Paintings: Pre 2000: item #754256 Please refer to our stock #12-23 when inquiring.
$280 |
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| A colorful and joyous folk painting from rural Huxian County in Shaanxi Province, China, shows seven young girls carrying baskets overflowing with pomegranates through an orchard. The girls, accompanied by birds, weave among low, fruit-laden trees. Done in gouache on paper, the charming, simple scene is a peasant painter's interpretation of a bountiful harvest day, and employs a once-favorite rural symbol, the multi-seeded pomegranate that represented the hope for numerous offspring. Huxian (Huhsien) was China's first peasant painting community, established in 1958. From there, the peasant painting movement spread across China and by 1989 there were 51 such communities. (See "The Best in Modern Chinese Folk Painting," Foreign Language Press, Beijing, 1989.) We first visited Huxian in 1991 while on an exchange program in near-by Xian, and after meeting the farmer/artists and visiting their homes, became intrigued by their paintings of rural life. Subsequently, we visited a number of other remote painting communities and discovered that the unique style of painting in a particular community often reflected the style of embroidery practiced by local women for centuries. During the Cultural Revolution, fine artists from the cities were sent to live in some of these rural communities, and their coaching merged with naive style to produce marvelous interpretations of country life. Unfortunately, after the paintings became more widely known, they were copied over and over, and lost their freshness and folk appeal. Today, most of the paintings available in China's tourist areas and sold as authentic peasant paintings are many times removed from the original works. We purchased this painting in 1991 from the artist in Huxian. Typical for folk paintings, it is unsigned. Dimensions of painting without mat: height 30-1/2" (77 cm), width 20-3/4" (53 cm). With mat: height 36-3/4" (93 cm), width 26-3/4" (68 cm). | ||||||||
