Snow Coloring the World White (1690): Art, History and Details

Snow Coloring the World White (1690) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Fa Ruozhen (Chinese, 1613–1696).

The work and its context

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

Fa Ruozhen was a scholar-official and prolific poet who focused on painting as his government career declined. The inscription records that he was 78 years old when he painted this handscroll to welcome visitors on a snowy day. At this point in his artistic development, Fa created expressive landscapes and experimented with unconventional brushwork. This handscroll begins at the right with gentle hills dotted with evergreens and bare deciduous trees. By the end, the twisting rocky forms dominate. Fa’s official career spanned the fall of the Han Chinese Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and the rise of the Manchurian Qing dynasty (1644–1911). While other scholar-officials who declined to serve the Manchus had their reputations enhanced, critics accused Fa of disloyalty for serving in the new bureaucracy. Fa was deeply sensitive about this criticism. In many of his 4,000 known poems, he responded by emphasizing the Confucian virtue of being a good administrator particularly during an unstable time. Fa’s “disorderly” brushwork and distressed landscapes seem to reflect the political upheaval of his era.

Object facts

• Title: Snow Coloring the World White
• Date: 1690
• Creator attribution: Fa Ruozhen (Chinese, 1613–1696)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: handscroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 29.3 x 297.2 cm (11 9/16 x 117 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1979.76

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sotheby’s, New York. Important Chinese Ceramics, Archaic Jades, Bronzes, Sculpture, Works of Art and Paintings. 1979 November 2. Sale 4296.
• 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.