The art of seal carving has a history of more than two thousand years in China, and finely carved examples bearing personal names, official titles, or poetic phrases have long been collected and admired as a special form of calligraphy. Fu Baoshi began taking commissions for seal carvings while still in high school to help his family after his father’s death, and he continued to carve seals for himself and others throughout his life. His design sensibility is shown in the imaginative interplays between figure and ground that are inherent to seal carving. The creation of albums of seal impressions also has a long history. Within this genre, collections of seal impressions belonging to individual artists have served as catalogues of their carving skills as well as a reference for comparison with examples on extant works of art.
