Paintings after Ancient Masters: Volume 1 (1598–1652): Art, History and Details

Paintings after Ancient Masters: Volume 1 (1598–1652) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Chen Hongshou (Chinese, 1598/99–1652).

The work and its context

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

The twenty paintings in this double album by Chen Hongshou include landscapes, figures, and flowers. It also has one leaf featuring a woman, an often-used subject not found in the other albums from the latter part of his career. His late works are wonderful summations of Chen's peculiar and quirky art—archaistic, hyper-refined—but without accompanying shallowness or sentimentality. His figures and landscapes in the late albums are miniaturized, not unlike the small Chinese gardens, or the carefully selected small table rocks or old roots used for contemplation to see the world in miniature. This loss of scale is quite deliberate and reflects the psychological situation of a depressed class like the Ming loyalist officials and scholars, deprived of their integrity and honor, and forced to lead a diminished and restricted existence.

Object facts

• Title: Paintings after Ancient Masters: Volume 1
• Date: 1598–1652
• Creator attribution: Chen Hongshou (Chinese, 1598/99–1652)
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album with eleven leaves; ink or ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 30.2 x 26.7 cm (11 7/8 x 10 1/2 in.); Overall: 30.2 x 53.4 cm (11 7/8 x 21 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1979.27.1

A detail from the museum

This album was owned by Weng Tonghe, who was tutor to the Tongzhi Emperor (r. 1862–75) and the Guangxu Emperor (r. 1875–1908).

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Five Centuries of Chinese Painting: Ming & Ch'ing Dynasties : [Exhibition] June 27 Through August 8, 1954, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1954.
• Goepper, Roger. 1000 Jahre chinesische Malerei. München: Haus der Kunst, 1959.
• Chinese Art: An Exhibition of Paintings, Jades, Bronzes and Ceramics. Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of Art, 1962.

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.