Xu Can in Iron Paintings

Xu Can was a famed poetess in early Qing. Her literary talents had long been recognized and hailed since the early Qing. I have been read the story of Xu Can and her poetry in local histories, genealogies, and biji.

Today I saw she was inscribed in wrought-iron painting:

Engraving to China

I am not sure how iron painting is related to engraving introduced by Jesuits to China in early Qing?

http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla62/62-walh2.htm

The Draft of Wrought-iron Painting

Rare did we see half-completed wrought-iron paintings. Here they are.

Rust needed to cleared before it is polished, painted, and mounted either on the screen or on the scroll.

Gendered arts?

Workshop of Wrought Iron Painting in the 1980s.

Before I saw this picture, I always imagined males as main forces to produce wrought iron paintings. However, females seems to be main forces of producers.

Look at hand tools for the paintings: hammer, wrench, benders, twisters, chizel

A blacksmith master is making hand tools for wrought iron paintings

Why are masters all males?

Chu Jinxia: The only female master?

Chu Jinxia: Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea

Greeting Guest Pine

Greeting Guest Pines, in Huangshan, Anhui Province, grow from the rocky crevices add to the splendor of the scenery. They always extend a long tree branch to one side as if in greeting to tourists, by which they obtain such a name as "greeting guest" (yingke).

Greeting Guest Pines at Mountain Huangshan

Greeting Guest Pines become an important subject matter of the wrought-iron painting since the 1950s. Wuhu artisans produced the paintings of Greeting Guest Pines and sent it to Beijing to decorate the People's Great Hall.

The Wrought Iron Painting of Greeting Guest Pines at People's Great Hall (Congress of PRC )

Wrought Iron Paintings of Wuhu

Lotus Blossoms

Tiehua can be literally translated as wrought iron painting. It is a form of painting made out of wrought iron, soft, easily worked, and fibrous.

In the late seventeenth century, an artisan named Tang Peng (1644-1722) collabrated with a famous painter Xiao Yuncong (1596-1673) created the new form of painting with wrought iron. The iron was malleable and welded into a painting in the style of traditional Chinese painting. The painting features spatial composition, continuum of wet to dry brush strokes, and thickness and thinness of ink, which we often see in the traditional Chinese brush painting.

The picture, painted in black, set against with the white background. The dimensional iron also reveals malleability of wrought iron. Mountains, rivers, figurines, flowers, birds, and insects, as long as they can be painted on the rice paper, become favorite subject matters of wrought iron paintings.

A Horse

A Train