At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a portrait of Jesus stuck the eye of the Westerners. It was not an oil painted portrait familiar to them, but had the space perception presented by oil paintings, and yet the delicacy and unique mystery emanated from the portrait were what common oil paintings could not present.
It was an embroidered Portrait of Jesus by Shen Shou, a recognized "Sage of Embroidery" a hundred years ago.
Shen Shou was born into a curio dealer's family i
n Wuxian County of Jiangsu Province in 1871. A girl known by her workmanship of Su Embroidery, she made a name for herself through the exquisite embroidery works.
Shen Shou
The Portrait of Jesus, an embroidery work won the gold prize at the Panama Expo, measures 54.8cm high and 39.4cm wide. It is crowned as "Holy Needle" by the world for its concordant texture, rich color and ingenious needlework.
Reproduced from the head portrait of Jesus in the famous Western oil painting the Crown of Thorns, the embroidery work describes the story of Jesus before his crucifixion. In the picture, Jesus wears the crown of thorns on his head, his forehead wounded by the thorns, blood dripping; his skin pale as sheet; his eyes turning up, staring at Heaven in agony.
The arrangement of threads is the first step of embroidery. The knack of the thread arrangement in the Portrait of Jesus lies in that Shen Shou broke through the traditional way of lining the threads in a single direction, but instead arranged the threads according to the texture of human body, which strengthened the textural quality and stereoscopic sensation. Meanwhile, the arrangement of threads needs to take into account the influence of refracted light when viewing from different angles, and the embroidery work integrated with characteristics of oil painting needs to consider this more. The Portrait of Jesus does quite well in this aspect: whichever the angle it is, the forehead of Jesus always looks bright and clean, the nose tall and straight, and the hair and beard elastic and changeful – the hair rich in layers, while the beard fluffy and elegant.
The rich color applied in Portrait of Jesus has been highly praised until now, with a total of 110 plus colors of threads being used. To present the fullness and thickness of the oil painting, Shen Shou creatively employed various stitching methods to add more colors, so that the Portrait of Jesus takes on a colorful look.
Shen Shou ingeniously used the grounding to create the specular of the eyes of Jesus. Moreover, she employed chromatics and scenography in the field of fine arts as well as the anatomy in medical science to create the simulation embroidery that has been recorded in history. The Portrait of Jesus is a representative work of simulation embroidery.
