Four female musician (Vietnamese: Tố nữ)

Southeast Asian Collection

Accession Nr.: 59.96.1
Type: woodblock print; hanging scroll
Date of production:
1950s
Place of production:
Materials/Techniques: paper, woodblock printing, hand coloured, mounted as hanging scroll
Dimensions: height: 131. 5 cm
width: 42. 8 cm
A musician girl in white holding a traditional instrument in her right hand, in front of a vase on a high table. In the vase is a pink lotus flower.
Tứ bình is a 16th-century Vietnamese folk painting form that arranges four images with a common theme into a single series. Made in the Hàng Trống workshop in Hanoi, these pictures were usually made for the Tết, or Vietnamese New Year, like Đông Hồ prints, and were very popular with the public. The themes of the quartets all revolve around different states of things and change, such as the four seasons, the ages, four female musicians with different instruments or the four occupations.