Couplet in seal script

Discussing stones, you have the pure reputation of Guo Youdao,
Painting plum blossoms, you humbly esteem Wang Yuanzhang.*

Huang Binhong is widely recognized as one of the foremost landscape painters of the twentieth century. Although less renowned as a calligrapher, he strongly emphasized calligraphy as the foundation of all brushwork and frequently addressed the subject in his writings. Huang Binhong was especially interested in epigraphy and began his study of ancient seal script as early as 1889, an interest he augmented over the years with his own growing collection of bronze seals. Most published examples of Huang's seal script date to the 1940s and 50s. As here, his primary focus was the archaic structure and formation of the characters themselves, rather than the expressive manipulation of brush and ink.

Huang Binhong was born in the town of Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, where his father was a cloth merchant. He received a fine classical education and already showed considerable promise in calligraphy, painting, and seal carving during his childhood. In 1883, Huang moved to Shexian, in Anhui Province, where he resided for most of the following twenty-four years, making many long excursions throughout the Yangtze delta region, where he had the opportunity to examine and copy famous works of painting and calligraphy in private collections. In the 1890s Huang became involved in revolutionary anti-Manchu politics, and in 1907 he was forced to seek refuge in Shanghai, where he remained for most of the next thirty years. In 1937, he moved to Beijing just before Japanese forces occupied the city and remained aloof from most public activities during the war. In 1948 he became a professor at the art college in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, and continued to write, teach, and paint until the time of his death.

* Guo Youdao may refer to the Han dynasty scholar, Guo Tai (128-169), who possessed an unusual ability to assess the character of others. Wang Yuanzhang was the Yuan dynasty painter Wang Mian (1287-1359), who specialized in painting branches of blossoming plum flowers.