Purification at the Orchid Pavilion (1671): Art, History and Details

Purification at the Orchid Pavilion (1671) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Fan Yi (Chinese, c. 1615–before 1688).

The work and its context

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

By the 1600s, the historic gathering at Lanting, Zhejiang province, in 353 CE was a common theme in Chinese painting. Originally based on a composition attributed to Li Gonglin (1049– 1106), now lost, Wu school artists revived the theme. Fan Yi, the brother of the artist Fan Qi from Nanjing, used delicate brushwork and luminous colors to depict the spring gathering.

Object facts

• Title: Purification at the Orchid Pavilion
• Date: 1671
• Creator attribution: Fan Yi (Chinese, c. 1615–before 1688)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 28.4 x 392.8 cm (11 3/16 x 154 5/8 in.); Overall: 29.8 x 763.3 cm (11 3/4 x 300 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1977.47

A detail from the museum

The gathering’s host is in the Orchid Pavilion at the end of the scroll, representing an episode known as “Wang Xizhi Watching the Geese 王羲之觀鵝圖.”

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Wai-kam Ho and the Womens Council of The Cleveland Museum of Art

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• Williams, Marjorie. Chinese Painting--an Escape from the "Dusty" World. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1981.
• Graham, Patricia Jane. Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1998.

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.