Emperor Yao Visiting Yu Chonghua (mid- to late 1600s): Art, History and Details

Emperor Yao Visiting Yu Chonghua (mid- to late 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Kusumi Morikage (Japanese, active c. 1620–1690).

The work and its context

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

One of a pair, this screen shows a section of the narrative of how the Chinese Emperor Yao (about 2356–2255 BC) selected his successor, Yu Chonghua (about 2294– 2184 BC), who would become Emperor Shun. The artist who painted this screen, Kusumi Morikage, trained with Kano Tan’yō (1602–1647), painter-in-residence to Japan’s shogun, the country’s ruler, and was one of his four top students. Despite the conservative subject matter, Morikage’s distinctive sensibility shines through in his playful treatment of the gray and white elephants in the far left panel of the composition. According to legend, Chonghua was so virtuous that in the spring, elephants bounded down from the mountains to help him till the soil with their tusks.

Object facts

• Title: Emperor Yao Visiting Yu Chonghua
• Date: mid- to late 1600s
• Creator attribution: Kusumi Morikage (Japanese, active c. 1620–1690)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: One of a pair of six-panel folding screens, ink, slight color, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 131.9 x 348 cm (51 15/16 x 137 in.); Including mounting: 147.3 x 363.7 cm (58 x 143 3/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1968.105

A detail from the museum

The emperor's two-wheeled carriage sits in front of a thatched-roof farmhouse.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cunningham, Michael R. Unfolding Beauty: Japanese Screens from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

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.