Herbaceous Peony (1685): Art, History and Details

Herbaceous Peony (1685) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Yun Shouping (Chinese, 1633–1690).

The work and its context

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

Yun Shouping came from Piling (modern Changzhou), Jiangsu province, a center of floral, plant, and insect painting. He had joined the anti-Manchu resistance, was briefly imprisoned, and witnessed the death of family members in 1644. Like other artists, Yun Shouping expressed his Ming loyalism in coded pictures. The peony, king of flowers, and a spring garden motif developed new meaning during the Qing dynasty. The inscription indicates that Yun turns the flower into a motif representing the glorious past. The herbaceous peonies here appear somewhat withered and pale, with faint reddish veins running through its broken branches, perhaps a coded message. The inscription reads, An old painting by an anonymous painter of the Northern Song Dynasty has five varieties of flowers painted in the boneless manner. Its colors are so beguiling and beautiful, that even after several hundred years its lead pigments are like new. The skill with which the ink and colors were applied and the subtlety of its composition find no equal among modern followers.

Object facts

• Title: Herbaceous Peony
• Date: 1685
• Creator attribution: Yun Shouping (Chinese, 1633–1690)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 118.7 x 71.8 cm (46 3/4 x 28 1/4 in.); Overall with knobs: 226 x 84.4 cm (89 x 33 1/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1967.192

A detail from the museum

In East Asian art, peonies traditionally symbolize prosperity and wealth.

Collection credit

Gift of the American Foundation for the Maud E. and Warren H. Corning Botanical Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1968.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 56, no. 1, 1969, pp. 3–50.
• 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.
• Suzuki, Kei 鈴木敬. Chūgoku kaiga sōgō zuroku [中國繪畫總合圖錄= Comprehensive Illustrated Catalog of Chinese Paintings], 第1卷. アメリカ·カナダ篇[= vol. 1 American and Canadian collections]. Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1982.

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.