Garden for Solitary Enjoyment (1515–52): Art, History and Details

Garden for Solitary Enjoyment (1515–52) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Qiu Ying (Chinese, 1494–1552).

The work and its context

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

Garden of Solitary Enjoyment refers to a site built in 1073 by the statesman Sima Guang (1019–1086) after he had retired to Luoyang, Henan province. Every spring, visitors would flock to his garden. Each of its seven structures references a historic figure. Sima wrote: I channel streams [like Du Mu], to water flowers [like Bai Juyi], or trim bamboo [like Wang Huizhi]. . . . I know of no joy between heaven and earth that could take its place. Qiu Ying’s painting, created after an 11th-century version of the same theme, must have appealed to garden owners of the Ming dynasty, since it became the template for numerous Suzhou workshop copies

Object facts

• Title: Garden for Solitary Enjoyment
• Date: 1515–52
• Creator attribution: Qiu Ying (Chinese, 1494–1552)
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink and light color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 28 x 518.5 cm (11 x 204 1/8 in.); Overall: 32 x 1290.2 cm (12 5/8 x 507 15/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1978.67

A detail from the museum

Sima Guang completed his monumental survey of Chinese history, Zizhi tongjian, in the garden depicted in this painting.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Weng, Wango H. C. Gardens in Chinese Art from Private and Museum Collections. New York: China Institute in America, 1968.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1978.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 66, no. 1 (January 1979): 3–47.
• 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.

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.