Scene from the Tale of the Wisteria Robe (1400s): Art, History and Details

Scene from the Tale of the Wisteria Robe (1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The Tale of the Wisteria Robe chronicles the family saga and spiritual wanderings of a noble whose garment has a signature scent. In the complete set of two scrolls, the paintings were preceded by textual passages and included dialogue floating over the characters depicted. This fragment of the story shows several figures engaged in private conversations held in chambers divided by sliding doors. Numerical notations in the text indicate the order in which things are being said.

Object facts

• Title: Scene from the Tale of the Wisteria Robe
• Date: 1400s
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: section of a handscroll mounted as a hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 16.2 x 33 cm (6 3/8 x 13 in.); Overall: 105.4 x 57.2 cm (41 1/2 x 22 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.132

A detail from the museum

Members of the court, both male and female, are depicted in dress and hairstyles from the earlier Heian period (794–1185).

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• Tōyō kaiga no seika: tokubetsuten: Kurīvurando Bijutsukan no korekushon kara [東洋絵画の精華: 特别展: クリーヴラント美術館のコレクションから= Highlights of Asian painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art]. Nara, Japan: Nara National Museum, 1998.
• Grossman, Nancy, James T. Ulak, Marjorie Williams, and Laurence Channing. Art of Japan: Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2005.

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.