Chinese Export Gouache Pith Painting, Butterfly & flowers, mid-19th century

A gouache watercolour painting on pith paper of flowers and a butterfly, painted with great realism. This would originally have been part of a set. The gouache colours are still bright with soft tone to the mulberry paper.

Incredibly fragile and increasingly rare, pith paintings are prone to damage. This one is in very good condition but does have a small tear on the right-hand side.

Access to China was restricted during the first part of the 19th century to the trading port of Canton (Guangzhou). With visitors looking for souvenirs, Canton-based artists turned to a local product which was cheap and plentiful, a small evergreen tree called Tetrapanax papyrifer. Slices of the white pith of this tree had traditionally been used to make artificial flowers and it was found that its velvet texture lent itself well to the application of watercolours. The oldest known Chinese pith watercolours date from the mid-1820s. The artists used gouache - watercolours with an added white pigment – and often applied it to the back of the paintings as well to increase opacity. Pith absorbs water so the paint layer is raised, creating an attractive embossed surface. The pith paintings were often bound in albums, and usually covered a single subject. Pith painting flourished between the 1820s and 1860s, but declined over the course of the century as photographs and picture postcards became available as mementos of a trip to China.