Tianhuang Seal

This seal is one of the great treasures of the Brooklyn Museum’s Chinese collection. It is carved in the form of a mountain cliff; the seal-carver exploited the dark natural veins in the stone to create the landscape. Beneath the waterfall is a tiny boat carrying the early-eleventh-century poet Su Shi past the Red Cliff. Su Shi’s prose poem recording his trip is famous in classical Chinese literature. On the bottom of the seal, Qian Song (1807–1860), one of the most influential scholar seal-carvers of the Qing dynasty, engraved the name of a studio for one of his associates, a man named Chunru, who would have impressed the bottom of the seal in red seal-paste on works of painting and calligraphy in his studio.