Jar with Dragon and Clouds Design (late 1600s): Art, History and Details

Jar with Dragon and Clouds Design (late 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

In traditional Korean art, dragons were used as an emblem of royalty. Over centuries, the ways of depicting this powerful mythical creature varied in response to artistic trends and socioeconomic changes. Here, the artist imagined with free-flowing calligraphic brushstrokes a whimsical dragon with bulging eyes who wraps his scaled body around the vessel. This piece was acquired from the London Gallery in Tokyo, Japan. Its owner, Tajima Mitsuru (born about 1936) is regarded as one of the pioneering Japanese art dealers to cultivate lasting relationships directly with collectors and museums in the United States.

Object facts

• Title: Jar with Dragon and Clouds Design
• Date: late 1600s
• Culture: Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: porcelain with underglaze iron
• Dimensions: Diameter of base: 13.7 cm (5 3/8 in.); Overall: 34.7 cm (13 11/16 in.)
• Collection: Korean Art
• Department: Korean Art
• Accession number: 1986.69

A detail from the museum

A mythical creature believed to have the power to make rain, the dragon is a prominent symbol of rulers in premodern East Asia; the image of dragons was used exclusively for the king's paraphernalia.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1986.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 2 (February 1987): 38–79.
• Cunningham, Michael R., Stanislaw J. Czuma, Anne E. Wardwell, and J. Keith Wilson. Masterworks of Asian Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.
• Jang, Gi-hoon. "Stylistic Changes in Joseon-Period Dragon Jars [조선시대 백자용준의 양식 변천고]." Misulsa yeongu (1998): 85-122.

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.