Dragon (early to mid-1600s): Art, History and Details

Dragon (early to mid-1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Soga Nichokuan (Japanese).

The work and its context

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

A dragon dives through clouds on this screen, while on the other screen, a tiger looks upon a waterfall as it prowls out of a bamboo grove. Tiger and dragon are traditional symbols of the balancing forces in the world, yin (the feminine aspect) and yang (the masculine aspect). This painting has a signature and seals, identifying it as a work by Soga Nichokuan, a painter thought to be from Sakai (near Osaka), and known primarily for his representations of hawk-eagles (kumataka).

Object facts

• Title: Dragon
• Date: early to mid-1600s
• Creator attribution: Soga Nichokuan (Japanese)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: six-panel folding screen; ink, slight color, gold, and silver on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 158.1 x 304.8 cm (62 1/4 x 120 in.); Including mounting: 173.4 x 377.2 cm (68 1/4 x 148 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.134.1

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• Cunningham, Michael R. Unfolding Beauty: Japanese Screens from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.
• Paget, Rhiannon. Divine Felines: The Cat in Japanese Art. Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2023.

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.