Beggars and Street Characters (1516): Art, History and Details

Beggars and Street Characters (1516) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Zhou Chen (Chinese, c. 1450–c. 1536).

The work and its context

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

Zhou Chen from Suzhou provides rare depictions of impoverished people that once filled the city’s markets and streets. Despite Suzhou’s prosperity, its rapid growth polarized society, including the wealthy and those who had deserted their farmlands, who were without homes, unemployed, or sick. Amid these are figures who inspire fear rather than empathy. The painting may thus be informed by local practices at the end of the lunar year, in which street beggars, in exchange for food or money, would dress up like ghosts and demons to drive out evil forces.

Object facts

• Title: Beggars and Street Characters
• Date: 1516
• Creator attribution: Zhou Chen (Chinese, c. 1450–c. 1536)
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink and light color on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 31.9 x 244.5 cm (12 9/16 x 96 1/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1964.94

A detail from the museum

Although Zhou Chen's original composition was an album of 24 figures, today it is mounted as two handscrolls, one in the Cleveland collection and one in the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Yang, Xin 楊新. “Zhou Chen de Qishi tu” 周臣的乞食圖 [Zhou Chen’s Beggars] , Meishu yanjiu 美術研究, 2, pp. 85–88.
• Sirén, Osvald. Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles. New York: Ronald Press, 1956.
• “Acquisitions of Works of Art by Museums and Galleries: Supplement.” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 107, no. 744, 1965, pp. 159–167.

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.