Crane (early to mid-1900s): Art, History and Details

Crane (early to mid-1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This crane stands in water swirling around its feet, suggesting that it may have been intended for an interior setting without real water. Cranes symbolize longevity in East Asia, where they are said to live a thousand years. Representations of cranes are found across the centuries in cast metal form in Japanese religious settings. They are depicted as surface motifs on sacred objects, such as ritual mirrors, or as crane-shaped ornaments or incense burners. In the modern era, metal animals were made as sculptural works of art or as decorative objects for gardens.

Object facts

• Title: Crane
• Date: early to mid-1900s
• Culture: Japan, Taishō period (1912–26) to Shōwa period (1926–89)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Overall: 96.6 cm (38 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1947.573

Collection credit

Bequest of Cornelia Blakemore Warner

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hollis, Howard C. “Bequest of Cornelia B. Warner.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 35, no. 6 (1948): 106–111.
• Sŏn, Sŭng-hye. The Lure of Painted Poetry: Japanese and Korean Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011.

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.