Rain-coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mt. Tiantai (1848): Art, History and Details

Rain-coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mt. Tiantai (1848) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Dai Xi (Chinese, 1801–1860).

The work and its context

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

The subject is not just Mount Tiantai in Zhejiang Province, the ancient seat of the most powerful Buddhist sect of Sui and Tang dynasties, but records a specific occasion in 1838 when an official visited Tiantai and began the reconstruction of a historic pavilion. As this coincided with the end of a long drought, the building was auspiciously renamed the Yulai (Rain-Coming 雨來) Pavilion. Ten years later, Dai Xi painted this handscroll to commemorate the occasion.

Object facts

• Title: Rain-coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mt. Tiantai
• Date: 1848
• Creator attribution: Dai Xi (Chinese, 1801–1860)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: handscroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 34.5 x 142.6 cm (13 9/16 x 56 1/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1979.54

A detail from the museum

Dai Xi actively resisted the Taiping rebels and drowned himself after their 1860 capture of his hometown, Hangzhou. For this loyal deed, Dai was posthumously rewarded with a temple built in his name.

Collection credit

Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1979." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 67, no. 3 (1980): 58–99.
• 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.