Landscape with Woodcutters Returning Home (1200s): Art, History and Details

Landscape with Woodcutters Returning Home (1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

In late Song dynasty Chinese Chan Buddhist temples, paintings of landscapes, animals, or plants frequently took the place of deities. This hanging scroll features the humble life of woodcutters in nature an is in keeping with the Chan emphasis on simplicity and on the spiritual benefits of manual labor. executed in broad, quickly applied washes and punctuated by dark dots and texture strokes, the work is inscribed by Xuzhou Pudu, a priest at Wanshou temple near the Southern Song capital at Lin'an (modern Hangzhou).

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with Woodcutters Returning Home
• Date: 1200s
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll, ink on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 124.5 x 58.3 cm (49 x 22 15/16 in.); Overall: 203.2 x 81.3 cm (80 x 32 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1988.20

A detail from the museum

A landscape with identical measurements in a Japanese private collection is also inscribed by Xuzhou. They may have been a pair of flanking scrolls in a triptych.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wilson, J. Keith. "Notable Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 3 (1991): 63-147.
• Tōyō kaiga no seika: tokubetsuten: Kurīvurando Bijutsukan no korekushon kara [東洋絵画の精華: 特别展: クリーヴラント美術館のコレクションから= Highlights of Asian painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art]. Nara, Japan: Nara National Museum, 1998.
• Little, Stephen. An Introduction to Chinese Paintings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles : Art Catalogues : LACMA, 2017.

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.