Watercolor on heavy wove paper. 380x558 mm; 15x22 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower right recto.
Born Dong Moy Shu in Oakland, California, Dong Kingman (1911-200) was formally educated in Hong Kong where he was given a traditional Chinese name. Hearing that he aspired to be an artist, an instructor gave him the name "King Man", meaning "scenery" and "composition" in Cantonese. He would come to define that name, combined later with his family name, through his prolific output of watercolor scene paintings. In fact, in the 1950s and 1960s, years after returning to California and New York, where he taught at Columbia University and Hunter College, Kingman designed backgrounds for numerous major motion pictures.
