Seated Arhat with Two Attendants (late 1200s): Art, History and Details
Seated Arhat with Two Attendants at the Cleveland Museum of Art: late 1200s, Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk. Explore the work's context, creator attribution and collection history.
Seated Arhat with Two Attendants (late 1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.
The work and its context
The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:
Arhat, or Lohan (羅漢 in Chinese), were the disciples of the historical Buddha. Later tradition tended to picture them in sets of 16, 18, or as many as 500. This is one painting from a larger set, with a seated arhat portrayed on a grand scale, overshadowing his own attendant as well as the ferocious figure who approaches him with an offering of a peacock.
Object facts
- Title: Seated Arhat with Two Attendants
- Date: late 1200s
- Culture: South China, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279)
- Type: Painting
- Technique: Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
- Dimensions: Overall with knobs: 201 x 75.5 cm (79 1/8 x 29 3/4 in.); Painting only: 94 x 50 cm (37 x 19 11/16 in.)
- Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
- Department: Chinese Art
- Accession number: 1976.91
A detail from the museum
The arhat holds a rolled up scroll, likely a sutra, and is seated before a standing screen decorated with a landscape painting.
Collection credit
John L. Severance Fund
Further reading listed by the museum
- Christie, Manson & Woods, London. Important Japanese Paintings, Buddhist Sculpture, and Other Works of Art. 8 June 1976. Lot no. 31.
- The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
- Ho, Wai-kam, Sherman E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980.
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.
Sources
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