A Research On The Design Of Letter Paper Album

Letter paper has an extremely long history derived from the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and there emerged letter paper for special private use in Tang Dynasty. Chinese letter paper was developed a lot and innovated richly in Ming Dynasty, when letter paper album began to become popular. Letter paper album is a collection of letter paper with wood engraving, which is a comprehensive work of art combined by painting, engraving and printing.In the seventeenth year of Chongzhen Emperor in Ming Dynasty (1644), Hu Zhengyan began to compile and engrave Shi Zhu Zhai Letter Paper Album which was finished in the first year of Hongguang Emperor (1645). The album consists of four volumes including 283 paintings, printed with the method of watercolor block printing and blanked stamping. As the painting, engraving and printing of Shi Zhu Zhai Letter Paper Album is so exquisite and delicate, the various fabrication patterns and rich themes had represented the highest level of letter paper printing technology, which is the exact reason why Shi Zhu Zhai Letter Paper Album is selected as the example to research letter paper album. However, a general survey of letter paper album research has proved that most of the previous researches laid too much stress on historical facts while too little attention has been paid to graphical analysis; the research emphasis mostly concentrated on the collection, classification and description of the origins and engraving technology, while the there has been too little analysis on its artistry and the social historical background implied in the design of letter paper album, so they failed to probe into the social cultural information contained in the design of letter paper album at the angle of the paintings themselves.This paper will analyze from the perspectives of the content, engraving skills, painting themes and forms of Shi Zhu Zhai Letter Paper Album, so as to interpret the cultural information implied in the pattern design of letter paper album. Hopefully the research of this paper on Shi Zhu Zhai Letter Paper Album could provide more materials for art history research and offer some inspirations to modern design.