Listening to the Sound of Autumn in a Misty Grove (1657): Art, History and Details

Listening to the Sound of Autumn in a Misty Grove (1657) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Zhang Feng (Chinese, active c. 1632–1662).

The work and its context

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

Zhang Feng from Nanjing passed the local government examinations shortly before the fall of the Ming dynasty. With the Manchu conquest, he joined the ranks of loyalists who refused to serve the new regime. He chose the intermittently frugal life of a Buddhist adept. Many of his paintings lament the loss of the empire. In this scroll, he depicts a lone figure in a stark landscape of frosty atmosphere enshrouded in mists. Close looking reveals red strokes that color the grounds, a way of expressing his loyalty to the Ming whose family name Zhu means red.

Object facts

• Title: Listening to the Sound of Autumn in a Misty Grove
• Date: 1657
• Creator attribution: Zhang Feng (Chinese, active c. 1632–1662)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 96.5 x 34.5 cm (38 x 13 9/16 in.); Overall with knobs: 199.7 x 59 cm (78 5/8 x 23 1/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1977.173

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• Griswold, William, Xiaofei Tian, Richard Von Glahn, Feng Zhao, S. J. Vainker, Masaaki Itakura, Jiang Wu, et al. China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta. Edited by Clarissa von Spee. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

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.