Moonlit Landscape (one of a pair) (late 1500s): Art, History and Details

Moonlit Landscape (one of a pair) (late 1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This unsigned and unsealed composition includes imagery from the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. Scanning the composition from right to left, four of the Eight Views subjects appear: sunset glow over a fishing village, returning sails off a distant shore, autumn moon over Lake Donting, and evening bell from a mist-shrouded temple. Not all the elements of the traditional Eight Views theme are here, but the artist suggests its literary presence by leading the viewer through a summer’s journey from one day to the next, aided, like the travelers in the landscape, by the light of the moon.

Object facts

• Title: Moonlit Landscape (one of a pair)
• Date: late 1500s
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: six-panel folding screen, ink on paper
• Dimensions: Framed: 155 x 364.2 x 60.6 cm (61 x 143 3/8 x 23 7/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2015.482.1

Collection credit

Gift from the Collection of George Gund III

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.