Orchid Pavilion Gathering (1777): Art, History and Details

Orchid Pavilion Gathering (1777) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Soga Shōhaku (Japanese, 1730–1781).

The work and its context

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

This painting depicts a famous gathering that took place in China in AD 353 to celebrate the Spring Purification Festival, also known as the Double Third Festival, as it takes place on the third day of the third lunar month. The host invited everyone to the Orchid Pavilion to compose poetry and drink wine. Guests floated wine cups down a nearby creek, and where they landed, people had to drink the wine and compose a poem.

Object facts

• Title: Orchid Pavilion Gathering
• Date: 1777
• Creator attribution: Soga Shōhaku (Japanese, 1730–1781)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 122.7 x 55.7 cm (48 5/16 x 21 15/16 in.); Mounted: 197.4 x 58.8 cm (77 11/16 x 23 1/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1979.53

A detail from the museum

The Buddhist temple Bairinji in Kurume City, Fukuoka prefecture, Japan, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, own compositions by the same artist on the same theme.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade 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.
• "Thoughts on a Group of Deity Sculptures at the Oiso Takaku Shrine." Kokka 國華 1312 (2005).

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.