Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (early-mid 1700s): Art, History and Details

Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (early-mid 1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Watanabe Shikō (Japanese, 1683–1755).

The work and its context

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

Watanabe Shiko enjoyed a versatile and successful career, as well as a privileged upbringing, in Kyoto. His surviving work indicates a capacity to diligently study, master, and then interpret several painting techniques—each of which varies considerably in appearance. These byobu (folding screens), for instance, reflect training in the Kano school idiom that favored a monochromatic ink palette, vigorous brushwork, and traditional Chinese—rather than Japanese—subject matter. Shiko rendered this scenery in a particularly expansive manner, suggesting the vastness of China's topography relative to Japan's. Frequent visitors to the museum will recall that Shiko also painted the collection's favored pair of byobu, the Irises (CMA 1954.603).

Object facts

• Title: Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang
• Date: early-mid 1700s
• Creator attribution: Watanabe Shikō (Japanese, 1683–1755)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 150 x 356 cm (59 1/16 x 140 3/16 in.); Mounted: 170 x 376 cm (66 15/16 x 148 1/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1960.284

A detail from the museum

This screen forms a pair with CMA 1968.267.

Collection credit

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Sherman E. Lee

Further reading listed by the museum

• Kanda, Christine Guth. “Watanabe Shikō’s Irises.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 71, no. 7 (September 1984): 240–251.
• Cunningham, Michael R. Unfolding Beauty: Japanese Screens from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.
• 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.