Landscape Album in Various Styles: The Stream of Wuling (1684): Art, History and Details

Landscape Album in Various Styles: The Stream of Wuling (1684) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Zha Shibiao (Chinese, 1615–1698).

The work and its context

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

At age 68, Zha Shibiao painted this album with seasonal landscapes in various styles. Painted in fresh colors and wet strokes, all depict typical scenes of Jiangnan. The mention of Wuling in the inscription signals the “Peach Blossom Spring,” but Zha Shibiao purposefully left out all the accepted iconography for that story: a lone fisherman, cave entrance, and village of hermits. Instead, two men in separate boats are engaged in conversation. Could they be talking about the way to the Peach Blossom Spring, or could one of them be that fisherman blessed by his unintended visit but no longer able to find his way back again? Around them unfolds a lyrical landscape, with willows along the shores, an empty pavilion, a wide-open lake surface, and endless distant hills.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape Album in Various Styles: The Stream of Wuling
• Date: 1684
• Creator attribution: Zha Shibiao (Chinese, 1615–1698)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: album leaf, ink and light color on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 29.9 x 39.4 cm (11 3/4 x 15 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1955.37.4

A detail from the museum

Zha Shibiao, a native of Anhui province, moved to Yangzhou later in his career, like so many of his fellow countrymen.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Severance A. Millikin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. Chinese Landscape Painting. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1954.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Lee, Sherman Emery, and James Robinson. The Colors of Ink: Chinese Paintings and Related Ceramics from the Cleveland Museum of Art. New York: Asia Society; distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1974.

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.