One page from a woodblock printed book mounted as an album leaf
Credit
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from June and Simon K.C Li, Fong Liu, Mei-Lee Ney, and Anne and Jim Rothenberg, in honor of Steven S. Koblik
Translation of the calligraphy: A pair of recluses, they stay around the cold pond, Sharing the same gloom of their crisp retreat. One holds and nurtures its “pearls” in the ripples’ wrinkles; The other, marble in color, emits its fragrance in the cold dew. One strolls in a casual, easy gait, like a silk girdle; The other, a lady’s garment, with its lower hem dispersed. Even if we go back upstream, it’d be hard to pick them, While they both offer the gemlike frost of their whiteness. On Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) and Lotus Root, Sun Yuwang
Unlike publishers who put several colors on a single carved block to produce color prints, Hu Zhengyan used a technique termed douban 餖版, using multiple blocks. Each color in the composition was printed with a different carved block that was usually small in size, just large enough to accommodate that part of the design. The resulting prints mimicked paintings with merging tonalities of colors and inks, often without outlines.