Sericulture (The Process of Making Silk) (early 1200s): Art, History and Details

Sericulture (The Process of Making Silk) (early 1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Liang Kai (Chinese, mid-1100s–early 1200s).

The work and its context

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

By the Southern Song period, the economic center of the silk industry had shifted to the lower Yangzi delta, while the north continued to be troubled by wars. Divided into three sections, the handscroll illustrates 14 steps in the process of making silk, from the raising of silkworms to the weaving of silk cloth. The scroll’s scenes follow the illustrations of Lou Shou’s (1090–1162) Pictures of Tilling and Weaving (gengzhi tu), the first recorded painting of this genre, which was conceived in Hangzhou around 1145. However, in the Cleveland painting the artist groups several scenes of sericulture together under the roof of an open structure.

Object facts

• Title: Sericulture (The Process of Making Silk)
• Date: early 1200s
• Creator attribution: Liang Kai (Chinese, mid-1100s–early 1200s)
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: First Section: 26.7 x 98.6 cm (10 1/2 x 38 13/16 in.); Second Section: 27.6 x 92.3 cm (10 7/8 x 36 5/16 in.); Third Section: 27.6 x 92.3 cm (10 7/8 x 36 5/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1977.5

A detail from the museum

The painting is attributed to Liang Kai, a court artist active from about 1201 to 1204 at the Imperial Painting Academy in the city of Hangzhou, a major silk weaving center from that time to the present day.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• Lee, Sherman E. “Listening to the Ch’in by Liu Sung-Nien.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 9 (November 1986): 372–387.
• Chen, Juanjuan, Nengfu Huang, Wenying Li, and Hao Peng. Chinese Silks. Edited by Dieter Kuhn and Feng Zhao. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

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.