Reeds and Geese (1314–17): Art, History and Details

Reeds and Geese (1314–17) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Yishan Yining [Issan Ichinei] (Chinese, 1247–1317).

The work and its context

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

Reeds and geese has been a common pairing in Chinese literary and visual culture for many centuries. This painting presents the contribution of a Japanese amateur painter, almost certainly a Zen Buddhist monk, to Japan’s fledgling efforts to add the theme to its own cultural vocabulary in the early 1300s. As was customary at the time in Japan, the painter did not sign or seal his work; the inscription, a poem added to the painting by the eminent émigré monk Yishan Yining, along with his signature and seal, was of far greater cultural value. Today, the modestly sized painting has tremendous significance as one of the earliest surviving examples of Japanese ink paintings with reeds and geese.

Object facts

• Title: Reeds and Geese
• Date: 1314–17
• Creator attribution: Yishan Yining [Issan Ichinei] (Chinese, 1247–1317)
• Culture: Japan, Kamakura period (1185–1333)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 80.4 x 32.2 cm (31 5/8 x 12 11/16 in.); Mounted: 158.5 x 42.2 cm (62 3/8 x 16 5/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2015.464

A detail from the museum

Tokyo National Museum owns a copy of this painting made by Kano Gyokusen (1796–1864) when he was 14 years old.

Collection credit

Gift from the Collection of George Gund III

Further reading listed by the museum

• Vilbar, Sinéad. “Reeds and Geese: A brief tour of George Gund III's bequest of Japanese art. Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 57, no. 3 (May/June 2017): 8–9.
• Vilbar, Sinéad. Reeds & Geese: Japanese Art from the Collection of George Gund III. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2017.

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.