Landscape (early 1500s): Art, History and Details

Landscape (early 1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sōami (Japanese, d. 1525).

The work and its context

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

Kyoto-based painter Sōami adapted the small-format Chinese album leaf and handscroll painting compositions belonging to the Ashikaga shogunate to the large-scale paintings he created for residences and Buddhist temples. As curator of the shogunal collection, Sōami would have carefully examined its Southern Song and Yuan dynasty Chinese paintings, gaining specialized knowledge of a variety of brush modes, including the soft style used for this painting. The scene is part of a continuous landscape once mounted in the folding screen format. Removed from the screen, this section of the painting was cut down, given new backing papers and a textile mounting with a hanging cord at the top and a roller with knobs at the bottom so that it could continue to be appreciated.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape
• Date: early 1500s
• Creator attribution: Sōami (Japanese, d. 1525)
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 128.5 x 111.7 cm (50 9/16 x 44 in.); Overall: 253 x 137.8 cm (99 5/8 x 54 1/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1963.262

A detail from the museum

Another part of this composition survives in Kyushu, Japan.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “Year in Review for 1963.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 50, no. 10 (December 1963): 263–294.
• "Oriental Art Recently Acquired by American Museums, 1963." Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 18 (1964): pp. 69–91.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.