I just can’t stop trying to capture the colours and designs of ancient bronzes.

The patinated “blue-green” bronzes are beautiful, and a good subject to paint with mineral blue and green colours.   Morgan Jones, who volunteers at Compton Verney, and is very knowledgeable about bronzes, once said he tried to imagine them new and shiny.  That inspired me to try to paint bronzes as they might have been.  So I spent a lovely spring holiday with friends at Knuston Hall crashing ink and colour.  I had them mounted in China as “collector’s handscrolls”.

Here is an old and new version of a you vessel.

I particularly like this dou from Shanghai Museum, imaging that the inlaid figures and animals were in turquoise, though they were in fact in copper.