Peach Blossom Dock Woodcut New Year's Paintings

The Peach Blossom Dock New Year's Paintings are a specialty of the water towns of the south of the Yangtze River, with illustrations and explanations in the style of comic-strip stories. Adopting woodblock overprinting, it has long been engaged in production using a relatively simple handmade method, with five colors of red, yellow, green, black and blue. Under the elaborate production of countless carving boards and printing workers, Suzhou New Year's Paintings are not only brilliant and colorful, but also have exquisite composition, prominent image, clear primary and secondary, rich in decorative, forming a beautiful and clear, strict and neat unique style of national art. There are many varieties of woodcuts in Taohuawu, which can be roughly divided into door paintings, agricultural paintings, children, beautiful women paintings, decorative pattern paintings, historical story paintings, and paintings of legends of China, etc. Among them are superstitious paintings of gods, goddesses and Buddha statues, and the contents of door gods, god of the kitchen stove, and the so-called "evil characters". Paintings containing the content of getting rich and making profits include "A Togetherness and Harmony", "Dolls Getting Profits", "Liu Hai Playing with Money", "Years of the Morning" and so on. Those related to agriculture include "Spring Cow", "Harvest", "Fish, Woodcutter, Plowing and Reading", "Great Harvest Celebration" and so on. Landscape paintings of landscapes have landscapes around, such as "Gusu Wannian Bridge", "Suzhou Gate of Heaven" and so on. Yongzheng after the emergence of the story of the drama film, a wide range of ancient and modern, there are single continuous, such as "Wu Sung Tiger", "Mount Huaguo", "Dingjunshan" and so on. Customs paintings have "Xuanmiao Guan temple fair", "Suzhou city inside and outside the 360 lines of the map" and so on. The local conditions and customs jump out from the paper, and today they have become valuable local historical materials. Some paintings are rich in patriotic colors, such as "corporate peace", "Liu Junmen defeated the French army map", etc., praising the Sino-French war patriotic general Liu Yongfu, can be described as earlier political propaganda paintings.

The Peach Blossom Dock Woodcut New Year's Paintings were named after the production of the Peach Blossom Dock area, which was once concentrated in the city of Suzhou. It is known as one of the five major folk woodblock prints in China, along with woodblock prints of Zhuxianzhen in Henan Province, Yangliuqing in Tianjin, Weifang in Shandong Province and Jinzhu in Sichuan Province.

In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, with the development of the city of Suzhou's economy, the Gate of Heaven concentrated in the area of many craft workshops, the most numerous store to the New Year's Paintings. The folk woodblock prints produced here made Taohuayu famous all over the world. Taohuayu woodblock prints were welcomed by the world for their rich subjects, elegant pictures and elegant colors, and became the representative of Chinese folk woodblock prints during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, along with Yangliuqing woodblock prints in Tianjin and Weifang woodblock prints in Shandong.

Ming Dynasty has gradually formed its own style, the Qing Dynasty, Yongzheng, Qianlong years for the flourishing period, known as "Gusu version". At that time and Tianjin Yang Liuqing, become the national woodblock prints of the north and south of the center.