Duck in Flight (mid-1500s): Art, History and Details

Duck in Flight (mid-1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Shikibu Terutada (Japanese, active mid-1500s).

The work and its context

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

These three fan-shaped paintings, now mounted as individual hanging scrolls, were once part of a set of 20 mounted on a folding screen. They portray the Chinese subjects, from left to right, of the scholar-official Pan Lang, Hanshan reciting his poetry to Shide, and a duck in flight above reeds. Pan Lang grew so fond of the mountain in his place of exile that when he was ordered back to the capital, he rode backward on his donkey so he could see it until it receded into the distance. Hanshan and Shide worked in the kitchen of a Zen monastery, but were actually reincarnations of the bodhisattvas Manjushri and Samantabhadra. The combination of a mandarin duck and reeds may have signified a level of attainment in Chinese civil service exams. All three paintings bear the seal of the Kantobased artist Shikibu Terutada. Shikibu was familiar with Kano school painting, but he also modeled his early style after that of the prominent Kanto-based Kenkō Shōkei (active about 1470–after 1523).

Object facts

• Title: Duck in Flight
• Date: mid-1500s
• Creator attribution: Shikibu Terutada (Japanese, active mid-1500s)
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: fan painting mounted as hanging scroll; ink and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 25 x 50.2 cm (9 13/16 x 19 3/4 in.); Mounted: 99.8 x 65.2 cm (39 5/16 x 25 11/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1992.140

Collection credit

Seventy-fifth anniversary gift of Leighton Longhi in memory of Yabumoto Soshiro

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.
• Longhi, Leighton R. Leighton R. Longhi: Forty-Five Years in Asian Art. [New York, N.Y.]: Leighton R. Longhi, 2019.

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.