Dream Journey among Rivers and Mountains, no. 90 (1658): Art, History and Details

Dream Journey among Rivers and Mountains, no. 90 (1658) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Cheng Zhengkui (Chinese, 1604–1676).

The work and its context

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

Cliffs and waterfalls interspersed with trees and dotted vegetation are spread over this handscroll. Long paths wind their way through villages, beside cottages, shrines, and over bridges. In the past, Chinese literati officials liked to take a “dream journey” along mountains and rivers when viewing landscape paintings in their studios. Scenery of this kind thus became a way to escape from the world of bureaucracy and administration. The painter Cheng Zhengkui used the title “Dream Journey” for a whole series of paintings, of which this is number 90. He is said to have painted 500 of them, but the actual count remains unknown.

Object facts

• Title: Dream Journey among Rivers and Mountains, no. 90
• Date: 1658
• Creator attribution: Cheng Zhengkui (Chinese, 1604–1676)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Painting section: 24 x 341.5 cm (9 7/16 x 134 7/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1960.182

A detail from the museum

Cheng Zhengkui planned to make 100 dream journey paintings but may have ultimately made 500.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sirén, Osvald. Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles. New York: Ronald Press, 1956.
• Goepper, Roger. 1000 Jahre chinesische Malerei. München: Haus der Kunst, 1959.
• Lee, Sherman E. Chinese Landscape Painting. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1962.

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.