Landscape with Flying Geese (mid-1200s): Art, History and Details

Landscape with Flying Geese (mid-1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Ma Lin (Chinese, c. 1185–after 1260).

The work and its context

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

This minimalist landscape places most of the representational elements in the lower right foreground. A lone gentleman strolls along a zigzagging path by the water. With the gentleman’s staff acting as a visual cue, the viewer’s gaze is directed to geese flying over distant mountains. The scene of a marshland, with its wet and soft ground dotted with vegetation, suggests springtime in Jiangnan. Combined with the flying geese, the album evokes the poetic lines: By spring fields, geese are about to return, Under chilly waters, fish are submerging. 春郊欲回雁, 寒水正沉鱼

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with Flying Geese
• Date: mid-1200s
• Creator attribution: Ma Lin (Chinese, c. 1185–after 1260)
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album leaf; ink and slight color on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 25.5 x 26.5 cm (10 1/16 x 10 7/16 in.); with mat: 33.3 x 40.5 cm (13 1/8 x 15 15/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1952.285

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. and Wai-Kam Ho. "Scattered Pearls beyond the Ocean." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Feb., 1964), pp. 23–39.
• Wang, Chi-chʻien. Album Leaves from the Sung and Yuan Dynasties: [Exhibition], March 26 Through May 30, 1970. New York: The [China House] Gallery, 1970.
• Ho, Wai-kam, Sherman E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980.

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.