Preface (1817): Art, History and Details

Preface (1817) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Rai Sanyō (Japanese, 1780–1832).

The work and its context

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

Historian Rai San’yō, whose family came from Hiroshima and achieved elite samurai status from modest beginnings as textile dyers, contributed three calligraphies to these albums, including this preface, in which he explains that the albums were being assembled to show off the beauty of the landscape along Lake Biwa near Hikone Castle in central Japan. The albums also feature one leaf each by San’yō’s father, a scholar, and his two uncles, a physician and a scholar turned local government official.

Object facts

• Title: Preface
• Date: 1817
• Creator attribution: Rai Sanyō (Japanese, 1780–1832)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Portfolio
• Technique: Double-leaf from a pair of folding albums; ink on silk
• Dimensions: Each page: 25.9 x 18 cm (10 3/16 x 7 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1972.117.1.1

A detail from the museum

From a samurai family, Rai Sanyō sought to evade training to be a bureaucrat, leading his father to lock him in his room for three years.

Collection credit

Gift of Mary B. Lee, C. Bingham Blossom, Dudley S. Blossom III, Laurel B. Kovacik, and Elizabeth B. Blossom, in memory of Elizabeth B. Blossom

Further reading listed by the museum

• Graham, Patricia J. "Lifestyles of Scholar-Painters in Edo Japan." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 77, no. 7 (September 1990): 262–283.

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.