Album of Landscape Paintings Illustrating Old Poems: Two Women with Needlework in a Garden (1745): Art, History and Details

Album of Landscape Paintings Illustrating Old Poems: Two Women with Needlework in a Garden (1745) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Hua Yan (Chinese, 1682–c. 1765).

The work and its context

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

Two women doing needlework are confined in an interior space. The other 11 paintings in this Hua Yan album show men in nature. The women may experience the natural world only through the large moon-shaped window open to a garden. Prominently displayed in the garden is a Taihu stone, like CMA 2022.23. Taihu stones are valued for their natural shapes and sculptural qualities and are a cultural peculiarity. These perforated limestones were originally sourced from Lake Tai in southeast China from where they got their names. Large ones were set up like sculptures in gardens, like the one in this painting.

Object facts

• Title: Album of Landscape Paintings Illustrating Old Poems: Two Women with Needlework in a Garden
• Date: 1745
• Creator attribution: Hua Yan (Chinese, 1682–c. 1765)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album leaf; ink and light color on paper
• Dimensions: Album, closed: 15.4 x 18.5 x 3.1 cm (6 1/16 x 7 5/16 x 1 1/4 in.); Each painting: 11.2 x 13.1 cm (4 7/16 x 5 3/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1982.68.6

Collection credit

Edwin R. and Harriet Pelton Perkins Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “Year in Review for 1982.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 70, no. 1, 1983, pp. 3–55.

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.