Gazing at a Waterfall (1790): Art, History and Details

Gazing at a Waterfall (1790) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Tani Bunchō (Japanese, 1763–1841).

The work and its context

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

Artist Tani Bunchō painted this image in a mountain pavilion during winter. He inscribed it with two lines of a poem: “The stone cliff of layered rocks is extremely high. Waterfalls tumbling from the skies reverberate in the clouds.” The scholarly figure and attendant carrying his qin (a stringed instrument) are set amid majestically soaring mountains in China. For many people in Japan at the time, the image would call to mind a poem about a waterfall at Mount Lu by Chinese poet Li Bai (701–762).

Object facts

• Title: Gazing at a Waterfall
• Date: 1790
• Creator attribution: Tani Bunchō (Japanese, 1763–1841)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 112.5 x 51.1 cm (44 5/16 x 20 1/8 in.); Mounted: 214 x 54.5 cm (84 1/4 x 21 7/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1972.16

A detail from the museum

Drive about eight hours west of Shanghai to get to Mount Lu, the mountain range likely alluded to in this painting.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sŏn, Sŭng-hye. The Lure of Painted Poetry: Japanese and Korean Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011.

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.