Page from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting 1679

This page from the "Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting" (1679) by Wang Gai, a Qing Dynasty artist, is a visual guide for aspiring painters. The page features a landscape with rocky cliffs, trees, and a small boat on a lake. It demonstrates the artist’s technique of rendering the landscape with precise line work and subtle washes of color, capturing the essence of Chinese landscape painting. This manual, a highly influential resource, helped shape the aesthetics of Chinese art for generations. The book’s name refers to the idea of containing a vast amount of knowledge within a small format.