Autumn Evening with Full Moon on Musashino Plain (early 1600s): Art, History and Details

Autumn Evening with Full Moon on Musashino Plain (early 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Tall grasses and autumn flowers reach out of thick green undergrowth in this depiction of the plain of Musashi, a site famous from classical Japanese poetry. A silver disc, now tarnished, represents the full moon. Flecks of cut-gold foil in the sky evoke the day’s passage into night. Once a wilderness with a vast horizon, Musashi is now densely populated.

Object facts

• Title: Autumn Evening with Full Moon on Musashino Plain
• Date: early 1600s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: One of a pair of six-fold screens; ink, color, and gold and silver foil on gilded paper
• Dimensions: Image: 170.2 x 346.7 cm (67 x 136 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2000.4.1

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cunningham, Michael R. "Reverie on a pair of Japanese screens", The Magazine Antiques, vol. 160, no. 1, July 2001: 108-113.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisitions Press Release,” March 17, 2000, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Cunningham, Michael. "Two Exhibitions of Japanese Painting." Orientations, vol 32, number 6 (June 2001): pp. 63-68.

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.