Solitary Colors of the Autumn Woods (first half 1600s): Art, History and Details

Solitary Colors of the Autumn Woods (first half 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Wang Jianzhang (Chinese, active 1621–1662).

The work and its context

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

Two gentlemen stand outside a thatched hut in a dense forest; some trees have bare branches indicating that the season is early autumn. Wang Jianzhang’s inscribed poem refers to a chapter called “Autumn Water” from Zhuangzi, a famous Daoist text written in the 3rd century BC: "Cold frost falls on the fences, / Solitary colors scatter the maples. / Reciting the chapter of “The Autumn Water,” / I cannot still the emotion in my old heart." Wang Jianzhang lived through the collapse of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and the rise of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), when China was governed by the Manchus, an ethnic people from Manchuria who were traditionally viewed as “barbarians” by the Chinese. The poetic reference to Zhuangzi’s “Autumn Water” seems to discreetly convey Wang’s feelings about his country being taken over. “Autumn Water” was about learning to take steps in the foreign way, but not acquiring a foreign tongue. Perhaps Wang was lamenting his conflicted situation. For survival he had to adapt to the new political and social climate, while still trying to maintain his own identity and Chinese traditions.

Object facts

• Title: Solitary Colors of the Autumn Woods
• Date: first half 1600s
• Creator attribution: Wang Jianzhang (Chinese, active 1621–1662)
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on satin
• Dimensions: Image: 117.8 x 51.2 cm (46 3/8 x 20 3/16 in.); Overall: 227 x 81.3 cm (89 3/8 x 32 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1972.68

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Vanderstappen, Harrie A. " The Style of Some Seventeenth-Century Chinese Paintings." In Artists and Traditions: Uses of the Past in Chinese Culture. Edited by Christian F. Murck, pp. 149–168. Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1976.
• 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.
• 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.

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.