Fish (c. 1400): Art, History and Details

Fish (c. 1400) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Four fish of various sizes are swimming among aquatic plants. Like in other paintings, the existence of water is suggested in the harmonious movement of the fish and plants. In Chinese, the word for fish (yu) is a homophone for “abundance” and thus the motif has an auspicious connotation. The painter uses the so-called boneless technique without outlines to shade and texture the bodies of the fish. The smooth transition from dark shades on their backs to their white bellies and the thin transparent fins and tails in light washes accentuated by gills and scales are all executed without contour lines.

Object facts

• Title: Fish
• Date: c. 1400
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll, ink and slight color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 35.1 x 53.3 cm (13 13/16 x 21 in.); Overall with knobs: 124.8 x 72.5 cm (49 1/8 x 28 9/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1977.201

Collection credit

Gift of Herbert F. Leisy in memory of his wife, Helen Stamp Leisy

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ho, Wai-kam, Sherman E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Laozi 老子 and James Legge, translator. Tao Te Ching 道德经. New York: Metro Books, 2008.
• Tang Yin 唐寅, Xu Wei 徐渭, and Qiu Ying 仇英. Ming Hua Quan Ji 明畫全集. Hangzhou Shi: Zhejiang da xue chu ban she, 2017.

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.