Returning Sails off a Distant Shore, from Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (1460s to 1550s): Art, History and Details

Returning Sails off a Distant Shore, from Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (1460s to 1550s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This painting and CMA 2015.590 belong to a group that was likely mounted as a pair of four-panel folding screens focusing on the Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang, a theme centered on an area in southern China. This one represents the motif “Returning Sails Off a Distant Shore.” Both emulate the style of Chinese painter Li Tang (about 1050–after 1130). Some scholars believe the paintings are the work of Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506), the only Japanese painter of his day to have traveled to China.

Object facts

• Title: Returning Sails off a Distant Shore, from Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang
• Date: 1460s to 1550s
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll from a set of eight; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 143.6 x 72.7 cm (56 9/16 x 28 5/8 in.); Mounted: 251.1 x 90.3 cm (98 7/8 x 35 9/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2015.589

A detail from the museum

Other paintings from the same set are in the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Collection credit

Gift from the Collection of George Gund III

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cunningham, Michael R., Shinʼichi Miyajima, and Yūji Yamashita. Ink Paintings and Ash-Glazed Ceramics: Medieval Calligraphy, Painting, and Ceramic Art from Japan and Korea. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000.
• Sesshū: botsugo 500-nen tokubetsuten [雪舟 : 没後 500年特别展 = Sesshu, master of ink and brush: 500th anniversary exhibition]. Tokyo: Maihichi Shimbun, 2002.
• Longhi, Leighton R. Leighton R. Longhi: Forty-Five Years in Asian Art. [New York, N.Y.]: Leighton R. Longhi, 2019.

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.