Reading Stand with Chrysanthemums and Autumn Grasses (early 1600s): Art, History and Details

Reading Stand with Chrysanthemums and Autumn Grasses (early 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Japanese reading stands often incorporate motifs associated with seasonal poetry. The combination of long, narrow, miscanthus grass, bush clover with its small, ovoid leaves, and chrysanthemum with its many-petaled blossoms is classic autumnal imagery. One lacquer technique featured prominently on the stand is sprinkled gold in low relief (hiramaki-e). Pear-skin ground design (nashiji-e) is used for the slopes of the ground and in some of the leaves.

Object facts

• Title: Reading Stand with Chrysanthemums and Autumn Grasses
• Date: early 1600s
• Culture: Japan, Momoyama period (1573–1615)
• Type: Lacquer
• Technique: Wood with lacquer, sprinkled gold powder (maki-e), and metal fittings
• Dimensions: Overall: 53.3 x 30.5 x 45.7 cm (21 x 12 x 18 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1976.15

A detail from the museum

Dew on chrysanthemum is seasonal imagery symbolizing the approach of winter.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1976.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 64, no. 2 (February 1977): 39–79.
• Yoshimura Motoo 吉村元雄. Kōdaiji makie 高台寺蒔絵. [Kyōto-shi]: Kyoto National Museum 京都国立博物館, 1971.
• Cunningham, Michael R. The Triumph of Japanese Style: 16th-Century Art in Japan. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with the Indiana University Press, 1991.

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.