Insects and Bamboo (1200s): Art, History and Details

Insects and Bamboo (1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This painting represents a microcosm (a world in small) of the Jiangnan ecosystem: while the bush cricket feeds on bamboo, the male widow-skimmer dragonfly is a predator of small insects like mosquitos. Mosquitoes, abundant in late summer and early autumn, suggest the fall season.

Object facts

• Title: Insects and Bamboo
• Date: 1200s
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album leaf; ink and light color on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 23.8 x 25.6 cm (9 3/8 x 10 1/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1985.364

Collection credit

The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• Cunningham, Michael R. “Painting the Poetry of the Natural World.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 7 (September 1988): 279–291.
• 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.

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.