Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Search the Mountain: Leaf 43 (1200s): Art, History and Details

Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Search the Mountain: Leaf 43 (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 and the one nearby belongs to a group of sketches with the theme “Clearing the Mountains” (soushan tu). The textual basis has long been lost; only the paintings survive. Here, fearsome divine soldiers fight against evil spirits depicted as animals and human-like creatures in mountains and forests. At the lower left, a soldier attacks a ram. To the right, two soldiers attempt to subdue a tiger. Three soldiers (one wielding a sword) emerge from an opening in the cliffs.

Object facts

• Title: Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Search the Mountain: Leaf 43
• Date: 1200s
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 34.1 x 38.5 cm (13 7/16 x 15 3/16 in.); Overall: 34.8 x 39.2 cm (13 11/16 x 15 7/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 2004.1.43

A detail from the museum

Soldiers charging through crevices confront a ram with a spear and put a tiger in chains.

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.
• Binyon, Laurence. Painting in the Far East; An Introduction to the History of Pictorial Art in Asia, Especially China and Japan. London: E. Arnold & Co, 1934.
• 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.