Cloudy Mountains (1130): Art, History and Details

Cloudy Mountains (1130) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Mi Youren (Chinese, 1072–1151).

The work and its context

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

Cloudy Mountains captures the view of a lush and misty riverscape, an impression of Mi Youren’s new environment, painted in a moment of peace. With the fall of the Northern Song dynasty in 1127 upon the Jurchen’s military invasion, Mi Youren fled south across the Yangzi River. In 1130, he had reached Xinchang in Zhejiang province and thanked his host with this painting for having given him shelter. Mi Youren was the oldest son of the art critic Mi Fu (1051– 1107); both developed a distinct style of mountain scenery by accumulating wet ink dots that create a hazy atmosphere.

Object facts

• Title: Cloudy Mountains
• Date: 1130
• Creator attribution: Mi Youren (Chinese, 1072–1151)
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 43.7 x 192.6 cm (17 3/16 x 75 13/16 in.); Overall: 45.5 x 646.8 cm (17 15/16 x 254 5/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1933.220

A detail from the museum

This scroll is one of the museum’s earliest dated Chinese paintings.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Tō Sō Gen Min meigaten-gō [唐宋元明名画展号]. Tōkyō: Tōkyō Asahi Shinbun Hakkōjo, 1928.
• "Part II. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Cleveland Museum of Art 1933." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 21, no. 2 (February 1934): 1–15.
• The Chinese Exhibition; A Commemorative Catalogue of the International Exhibition of Chinese Art, Royal Academy of Arts, November 1935-March 1936. London: Faber and Faber, 1936.

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.