Landscape (1700s): Art, History and Details

Landscape (1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This composition was fashioned after works created by Zen clerics of the Muromachi period (1392–1573), who often added their original Chinese-style poems above an ink painting to make a hanging scroll called a shigajiku. The poems here quote from essays on Sima Guang (1019–1086) by the Chinese Song dynasty literatus Su Shi (1037–1101). They interpret the studio surrounded with bamboo as a metaphor for the garden of Sima, the Song dynasty scholar-official who, in imitation of the Tang poet Bai Juyi, enjoyed the garden in isolation during his exile in Luoyang.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape
• Date: 1700s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting only: 102.8 x 54 cm (40 1/2 x 21 1/4 in.); Including mounting: 182.9 x 60.7 cm (72 x 23 7/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.111

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• Sŏn, Sŭng-hye. "The Lure of Painted Poetry." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 51, no. 2 (March/April 2011): 4–5.
• Sŏn, Sŭng-hye. The Lure of Painted Poetry: Japanese and Korean Art. Cleveland, OH: The 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.