Bamboo and Plum (1500s): Art, History and Details

Bamboo and Plum (1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sesson Shūkei (Japanese, active 1504-c. 1589).

The work and its context

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

This painting of a white plum (or prunus) and bamboo was once part of a triptych. A central image of the demon-queller Zhong Kui was flanked by this painting and one of a red plum and bamboo. The paintings would have been suitable to hang after the turn of the new year, when Zhong Kui would drive out evil demons, and the year’s first flowers were in bloom. Sesson hailed from what is now Ibaraki prefecture in northern Honshu. A Zen monk, he spent much of his career in the Kanto region, and developed a distinctive style uninhibited by formal training in the Kano atelier.

Object facts

• Title: Bamboo and Plum
• Date: 1500s
• Creator attribution: Sesson Shūkei (Japanese, active 1504-c. 1589)
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Mounted: 198.1 x 60.4 cm (78 x 23 3/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2015.503

Collection credit

Gift from the Collection of George Gund III

Further reading listed by the museum

• Feltens, Frank, Yukio Lippit, and Aaron M. Rio. Sesson Shūkei: A Zen Monk-Painter in Medieval Japan. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, 2021.

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.