Fragment Mounted as a Box Cover with a Scene from Amida's Paradise (1100s): Art, History and Details

Fragment Mounted as a Box Cover with a Scene from Amida's Paradise (1100s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The lid of this box has a fragment of an image representing the Pure Land of the Buddha Amida, and an interior decorated with lotus petals. The original, complete composition may have been a panel housed within a shrine cabinet, and used for meditation. An aversion to discarding sacred images likely led to the fragment’s incorporation into this small box.

Object facts

• Title: Fragment Mounted as a Box Cover with a Scene from Amida's Paradise
• Date: 1100s
• Culture: Japan, Heian period (794–1185)
• Type: Lacquer
• Technique: gold lacquer on wood
• Dimensions: Overall: 2.6 x 7.8 cm (1 x 3 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1961.91

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. Japanese Decorative Style. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1961.
• Lee, Sherman E. “Year in Review 1961.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 48, no. 9 (November 1961): 219–251.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.