Willows and Ducks

Based on the painting by Huang Shen (1687-1772 AD), one of the painters known as the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou”, this embroidery piece illustrates a scene of a pair of ducks swimming leisurely in the water by the side of waving willow branches in breeze, a perfect visual expression of the household Chinese poem line “ducks swimming in the river are the first to know that the spring has come”. Various techniques were adopted in the piece, including long and short stitches (tao zhen, 套针), block shading stitches (qiang zhen, 抢针), neat stitches (qi zhen, 齐针), seeding stitches (dian zhen, 点针), broken-line-making stitches (xu zhen, 虚针), etc.