Whether it’s in the form of growing plants, precious stones, or deliberately blended pigments, there’s a human impulse to surround ourselves with green in the art we create, the environments we inhabit, and the spaces we build. Green evokes fertile landscapes, growth and prosperity, and even health and wellness. Learn about how green has been made and understood across various cultures and traditions represented in the museum’s collections.
At A Glance
The mixture of blue and yellow to make green is also often used in paintings and prints, but there are other greens that can be used as well. In this image, indigo and yellow are combined to create the green trees, while a copper-based pigment was used to create the green robe.
The green patina on copper and bronze objects occurs as the copper corrodes. Patina occurs naturally when copper comes into contact with salty or acidic surroundings. See, for instance, how a range of corrosion products affects the surface color of the ancient Chinese bronze ritual vessel below: most of the surface is covered with a smooth, tin oxide-stained pale green with copper compounds, but there are also numerous scattered small patches of dull red cuprite, and the bright, powdery green seen here and there represents copper chloride. Explore this object in 3D:
Copper corrosion products can be taken advantage of to create man-made copper green pigments; more commonly, however, the green mineral malachite can be ground to make paints. Malachite is often used in paintings in China.
Copper, together with lead, is often the basis of green glazes in ceramics. Mixtures of copper with yellow particles of lead tin oxide or lead antimony oxide are also used for green enamels.
Okabe Mineo (1919–1990, Seto, Aichi Prefecture) was the son of Kato Tokuro, another leading figure in the Momoyama Revival. During his early career, Okabe continued his father’s repertory of Mino-style Oribe, Yellow Seto, and Shino glazes. (From the early 1960s, he focused on Chinese-style celadon glazes.) Nonetheless, he exhibited his works not in the annual Traditional Craft Exhibition but in the fine arts Nitten, where ceramics were shown alongside painting and sculpture. In the 1954 Nitten exhibition, his Green Oribe-glazed jar received a major prize. Okabe’s throwing is deft and fast, and his Green Oribe glaze is a deep, blue-edged tone. His versions of the “gong-shaped” serving dish, in both Green Oribe and Yellow Seto modes, show how a potter might develop a distinctive form and then try it in diverse glaze formats.
Chrome green is a very new addition to the artists’ palette, only becoming prevalent in the nineteenth century, but it can be found in many of the American works at the National Museum of Asian Art.
The smooth, luminous blue-green glaze of this vase is characteristic of celadon made in Longquan, in south China, during the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century. The handles, molded in the shape of fish with dragon heads, provide the sole decoration. Although the shape is modeled after a bronze vase, the texture of the Longquan glaze is often compared to jade, a prized material in China. Vases like this were made for domestic use and export.
Culture and language affect color perception. The Chinese word for the color of this dish is qing, which can be translated as “celadon.” Chinese ceramics in this color family were greatly admired in Europe, so the name transferred to them. The glaze color is not a straightforward “blue” or “green” as signified in everyday English, but it exists somewhere in this continuum of colors.
This wine bottle combines carved decoration and the clear, blue-green glaze that is considered ideal for celadons made during Korea’s Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), when ceramic production reached a high level of technical sophistication. The fantastical surface design comprises two large figures of phoenixes flying among thickly scrolling peony scrolls, which cover the bottle from the neck to a narrow band just above the foot. Firm outlines define the motifs, which are further emphasized by lightly beveled cuts on the outside that encouraged the glaze to pool and thus deepen in color, providing a “shadow” around the motifs. Fine incised lines render details of the birds and leaves.
In the arid state of Rajasthan in northwest India, eagerly awaited annual monsoon rains transform brown hills into verdant jungles. In the past, good monsoons meant prosperity, while scant rains led to inflation, unrest, and even famine. By layering greens, this hunt scene from the eighteenth century celebrates the kingdom’s prosperity as much as it does the king’s prowess. The painter Jugarsi praised the kingdom’s good fortune by depicting a lush and densely forested ravine after a particularly good monsoon. He wove together the jungle’s undergrowth from sweeping flourishes of minty grass, daubed leaves in shades of chartreuse and moss, and long lateral waves of deep green pigment. The silvery river snaking down the length of the left edge of the painting, where the king’s servants relax awaiting the end of a royal hunt, is another sign of an excellent monsoon season.
Mass industrialization and urbanization altered attitudes toward green space in the late nineteenth century in both Europe and the United States. As working-class populations increasingly gravitated to cities for jobs in factories, they left behind rural landscapes for pollution-choked cities and cramped living quarters. Reformers advocated for parks and green spaces to offer healthful respites for those living in potentially unsanitary quarters. Touting the health benefits of fresh air and time outdoors, middle- and upper-class Americans and Europeans with means decamped to rustic retreats to recharge and treat all variety of illnesses, from tuberculosis to neurasthenia—an ailment tied to the fast pace of modern life.
Writing to Charles Lang Freer from his summer studio in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1894, the painter Thomas Dewing observed, “I wish you could be here, taking in this cool fresh air filled with bird notes & scents of flowers.” Two years later, Dewing translated the sensory pleasures of a woodland ramble into the visual language of painting, noting in a letter to Freer that he had begun to paint a pair of screens representing “the four forest notes—the Hermit Thrush, the sound of running water, the woodpecker, and the wind through the pine trees.”
Inspiration for the screens came from a variety of sources, the most direct being the evocative New England landscape. The idea for a bifold screen may have come from Dewing’s 1895 visit to the Paris studio of James McNeill Whistler, where Dewing had seen a Japanese screen painted with a Nocturne, Whistler’s term for his moonlit river views. Dewing knew that the Japanese format appealed to Freer, for he often acted as the collector’s agent at Yamanaka & Co., a New York dealer in Asian art. During the two years that Dewing worked on The Four Sylvan Sounds, Freer acquired twelve Japanese screens. The influence of those works is apparent here in the forest leaves and flowers, painted with a stencil, recalling the elegant, stylized patterns of several screens in Freer’s Japanese collection.
