River Village in a Rainstorm (c. 1480–1507): Art, History and Details

River Village in a Rainstorm (c. 1480–1507) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Lu Wenying (Chinese).

The work and its context

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

In this scene, windswept rain pelting a village captures the power of nature in a masterful composition. Lü Wenying from Zhejiang served as a court painter during the Hongzhi era (1488–1505). Hardly known, with few remaining works, he is considered a Zhe school painter who followed the style of the Southern Song academy. Zhe school painters, named after the province of Zhejiang, transformed the poetic scenery of the Southern Song artists into dramatic, large-scale views. Active in the same region with frequent monsoon rains in the summer season, artists were familiar with outbreaks of rain and storms.

Object facts

• Title: River Village in a Rainstorm
• Date: c. 1480–1507
• Creator attribution: Lu Wenying (Chinese)
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink and slight color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 170.5 x 103.4 cm (67 1/8 x 40 11/16 in.); Overall with knobs: 279.6 x 134.3 cm (110 1/16 x 52 7/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1970.76

A detail from the museum

A young boy peeks out a window perhaps viewing the two people struggling through the rain.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Suzuki, Kei 鈴木敬. Chūgoku bijutsu 中國美術. Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1972.
• Suzuki, Kei 鈴木敬. Ri Tō, Ba En, Ka Kei 李唐・馬遠・夏珪. Tōkyō: Kōdansha, Shōwa 49 [1974].
• Lee, Sherman E. “Early Ming Painting at the Imperial Court.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 62, no. 8, 1975, pp. 243–259.

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.