Fushan Monastery (c. 1588): Art, History and Details

Fushan Monastery (c. 1588) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Song Xu (Chinese, 1525-c. 1606).

The work and its context

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

By the 1500s, visits to historic and scenic sites in the lower Yangzi delta stimulated an increase of printed illustrated travel books. Topographical depictions of local scenery flourished. Leaves from this album illustrates sites around Lake Tai of the two adjacent counties Changxing and Wuxing (modern Huzhou). Song Xu, who lived intermittently in Jiaxing and Songjiang, must have passed through Wuxing by boat and thus knew the region. The paintings are inscribed with gazetteerlike notations, suggesting that the album was produced for clients as commemorative works, a travel guide, or for “armchair travel” (woyou) in one’s mind.

Object facts

• Title: Fushan Monastery
• Date: c. 1588
• Creator attribution: Song Xu (Chinese, 1525-c. 1606)
• Culture: China, Jiaxing, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album leaf; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 26.4 x 28.4 cm (10 3/8 x 11 3/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1998.78.8

Collection credit

The Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chou, Ju-hsi and Anita Chung. Silent poetry: Chinese paintings from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015.
• Wu, Jiang. “Jiangnan Buddhism in Time and Space.” In China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta, edited by Clarissa Von Spee, 72-77. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

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.