Plum Blossoms (probably 1739): Art, History and Details

Plum Blossoms (probably 1739) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Wang Shishen (Chinese, 1686–1759).

The work and its context

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

A native of Anhui province, Wang Shishen was a professional painter who specialized in plum blossoms. He moved to Yangzhou in the late 1720s to seek patrons. Here, the daring composition of a flowering plum branch is balanced through the addition of four poems. Wang’s poems evoke nostalgia for the forgotten Six Dynasties period and the glorious Sui dynasty, during which the Grand Canal was built while Yangzhou was the southern capital of the empire. Other inscriptions in the upper part of the painting allude to the fact that Wang had developed blindness in one eye, probably at the time he conceived this painting.

Object facts

• Title: Plum Blossoms
• Date: probably 1739
• Creator attribution: Wang Shishen (Chinese, 1686–1759)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 144.4 x 75.7 cm (56 7/8 x 29 13/16 in.); Overall: 238 x 89.1 cm (93 11/16 x 35 1/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1985.366

Collection credit

The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ōsaka Shiritsu Bijutsukan [大阪市立美術館 = Osaka Municipal Museum]. Yōshū Hakkai [揚州八怪 = The Eight masters of Yangzhou]. Ōsaka: publisher not identified, 1969.
• 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.

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.