Landscape with a Distant Temple (1600s): Art, History and Details

Landscape with a Distant Temple (1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A traveler has presumably descended from the distant temple compound that consists of several buildings linked together by a winding trail lined with steps. The highest point in the compound is occupied by the most sacred structure in Buddhist temple architecture: a mulitroofed pagoda. This rugged landscape, with its towering craggy peaks, pine forests, and river, typifies the idealized image of religious sanctuary in East Asian medieval ink painting.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with a Distant Temple
• Date: 1600s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 195.6 x 57.2 cm (77 x 22 1/2 in.); Painting only: 107.7 x 45 cm (42 3/8 x 17 11/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1979.52

A detail from the museum

This painter emulated the style of Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506) a Japanese artist who traveled to China to study painting.

Collection credit

The Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1979." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 67, no. 3 (1980): 58-99.
• Cunningham, Michael. “Painting the Wind: A Mid-Fifteenth Century ‘Suibokuga.’” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 72, no. 7 (November 1985): 363–377.

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.