Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Procession of Daoist Deities: Leaf 21 (1200s): Art, History and Details

Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Procession of Daoist Deities: Leaf 21 (1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This leaf is part of an important album of 50 drawings encompassing three subjects: processions of Daoist deities to the celestial spheres, the Ten Kings of Hell, and Erlang’s Campaign to Rid Mount Guankou of Dangerous Beasts (soushan tu 搜山圖). This leaf belongs to a group of drawings of deities of the Daoist pantheon that inspired Chinese Buddhist iconography in many instances. Here we see the personified Nine Brilliant Constellations (Jiu yao 九曜). From right to left in the upper row are the sun and moon followed by three other stars: Venus as a goddess, Mars, and Yuebei. Proceeding in the lower row from right to left are Luohou, the comet Jidu, Ziqu, Jupiter, Mercury depicted as a female, and Saturn.

Object facts

• Title: Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Procession of Daoist Deities: Leaf 21
• Date: 1200s
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 34.1 x 38.3 cm (13 7/16 x 15 1/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 2004.1.21

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund in honor of Dr. Ju-hsi Chou and Gift of various donors to the department of Asian Art (by exchange)

Further reading listed by the museum

• Martin, F. R.. Zeichnungen nach Wu tao-tze aus der götter- und sagenwelt Chinas. München: F. Bruckmann a.g, 1913.
• Huang, Shih-shan Susan. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.
• Chou, Ju-hsi and Anita Chung. Silent poetry: Chinese paintings from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.