Bird on a Flowering Branch (1100s): Art, History and Details

Bird on a Flowering Branch (1100s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A male redstart sits hunched on the branch of a flowering plum tree in early spring. The bird’s plumage is rendered in fine detail with a great naturalistic sense, characteristic of Southern Song court painting. While redstarts tend to spend the winter in warmer climates, they may have been seen during the mild winters in China’s southeast in Hangzhou, the seat of the former imperial painting academy where this album leaf was presumably produced. The small square painting must have once been part of an album. When collected in Japan, it was mounted as a hanging scroll, presumably to fit it in an alcove to be enjoyed during the tea ceremony.

Object facts

• Title: Bird on a Flowering Branch
• Date: 1100s
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: album leaf mounted as a hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 23.8 x 24.5 cm (9 3/8 x 9 5/8 in.); Overall: 117 x 41.7 cm (46 1/16 x 16 7/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1985.371

A detail from the museum

The seal at the upper left is an official Yuan dynasty seal used on paintings and calligraphy in the imperial collection.

Collection credit

The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ho, Wai-kam, Sherman E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Cunningham, Michael R. “Painting the Poetry of the Natural World.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 7 (September 1988): 279–291.
• Laozi 老子 and James Legge, translator. Tao Te Ching 道德经. New York: Metro Books, 2008.

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.