Fish and Rocks (mid- to late 1600s): Art, History and Details

Fish and Rocks (mid- to late 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Bada Shanren (Chinese, 1626–1705).

The work and its context

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

Bada Shanren, also called Zhu Da, a 17th-century painter who rejected conventions in favor of an individual, personal expression, is known for his unorthodox compositions of fish, flowers, birds, and rocks. Fish in his paintings are often looking upward toward heaven, swimming in a pond of undefined space. As a member of the Ming imperial family, Zhu Da lost his princely status and hid in a monastery when the Manchus, foreigners from the north, established the Qing dynasty in 1644. This scroll may have some autobiographical meaning, representing fish as leftover subjects (yimin) who lived in a void, having lost their roles in life after the fall of the dynasty.

Object facts

• Title: Fish and Rocks
• Date: mid- to late 1600s
• Creator attribution: Bada Shanren (Chinese, 1626–1705)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 29.6 x 158.4 cm (11 5/8 x 62 3/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1953.247

A detail from the museum

After each poem, Bada Shanren used his so-called jixingyin seal 屐形印, which resembles the impression of a shoe on soft mud.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sirén, Osvald. Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles. New York: Ronald Press, 1956.
• Lee, Sherman E. “Some Problems in Ming and Ch'ing Landscape Painting.” Ars Orientalis, vol. 2, 1957, pp. 471–485.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.