Panel from Model Cooking Stove: Lancer Jousting with a Tiger (100–1 BCE): Art, History and Details

Panel from Model Cooking Stove: Lancer Jousting with a Tiger (100–1 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Han dynasty tombs were often furnished with grave goods to provide the deceased with items for the afterlife. Four earthenware panels were made in molds and then joined together to make a miniature model of a stove. Opposite one another on the two long sides of the stove are representations of the eastern dragon and western tiger, here fended off by a lancer.

Object facts

• Title: Panel from Model Cooking Stove: Lancer Jousting with a Tiger
• Date: 100–1 BCE
• Culture: China, from a tomb in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: earthenware with impressed relief decoration
• Dimensions: Overall: 11.9 x 31.1 x 1.9 cm (4 11/16 x 12 1/4 x 3/4 in.)
• Collection: China - Han Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1925.135

Collection credit

Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Whiting, Frederic Allen. “The Bequests of Mary Warden Harkness: A Tribute and an Accounting.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 15, no. 2, 1928, pp. 43–50.
• Janse, Olov and C.T. Loo. Briques et objets céramiques funéraires de l'époque des Han. Paris: Les Éditions d'art et d'histoire, 1936.
• Stites, Raymond S. The Arts and Man. New York: Whittlesey House, 1940.

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.