A sizeable album of watercolours by the famous export painter Zhou Peichun of Peking (Beijing) depicting life in the city,

Zhou Peichun was one of the most popular export painters active in the late Qing Dynasty, with a considerable studio and numerous assistants all working to supply the demand from Western audiences for Chinese paintings. His characteristic text descriptions accompanying each image, and signature red stamp, firmly identify Zhou Peichun as the painter alongside his stand out style. This present album contains 96 individual paintings of Beijing inhabitants in their daily life, a subject he focussed on and was popular with Western tastes, and has retained its wonderful colour vibrance.

Institutions and historians today find Zhou Peichun particularly important for recording important cultural information of the Qing dynasty and life in pre-Revolutionary China as many of the customs he describes with his text have now vanished. Alongside more typical depictions of trades, such as paper-making, medicine mixing, dentists, and dumpling cooking, there are other interesting scenes such as gambling, setting a baby to sleep, musicians, horses and bullocks ploughing, hand-making clay tiles, and much more. Hard to find in such condition and this many images untouched in their original album.

Institutionally important with significant collections in the British Museum, the V&A (648 specimens), the Leiden Special Collections (34 specimens), The Wellcome Collection (30 specimens), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (50 specimens).

Landscape album (35 x 26 cm); 96 watercolour paintings on thin paper, each described and signed by the artist in Chinese; original blue silk covered boards, six point sewn spine, a little rubbed, internally fine.