21 Wu Jiayou (?-1893)
Women in the Twelve Months
1890
album of twelve leaves, ink and color on silk
each leaf 27.2 x 33.2 cm
Shanghai Museum
Wu Jiayou worked for a number of years as a staff illustrator for Shanghai's
first pictorial magazine, Dianshizhai Pictorial. After establishing
a newspaper, Shen Bao, in 1872, which was aimed at the Chinese market
and was skillfully edited and run by a Chinese staff, the British entrepreneurs
Frederick and Ernest Major acquired several Chinese book companies and undertook
the photo lithographic printing of Chinese books. The art in their Dianshizhai
Pictorial, which was first issued in 1884, often combined Western conventions
with Chinese, thus producing a result that was intrinsically appealing to
a Chinese audience, but which also satisfied its growing interest in Western-style
modernity.
Wu Jiayou's album is a celebration of female beauty and high fashion, and
records, as though journalistically, the styles of 1890s Shanghai. Although
thematically related to Japanese prints of the mid-nineteenth century, in
execution it combines the finest techniques of Chinese outline painting
with Western conventions of volume and space.