Streams and Mountains (1372): Art, History and Details

Streams and Mountains (1372) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Xu Ben (Chinese, 1335–1380).

The work and its context

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

Like many literati of the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties, Xu Ben was entangled with the perils of dynastic change as well as the ups and downs of his official career. It was mainly through the art of painting and poetry, as well as the ideal of reclusion, that he sought feelings of exhilaration and shared them with his friends. Xu created this monumental landscape during one of his periods of reclusion. His innumerable “hemp-fiber” texture strokes create a unifying rhythm among the towering mountains with tightly knit masses of rocks. Nestled among shady trees at the base of the mountain is a rustic retreat, which a scholar approaches on foot to visit with the hermit. Among the five inscriptions at the top of the painting is one by the artist himself. He dedicated the painting to someone named Jifu 吉夫 and recorded a poem in praise of mountains. Green trees, yellow orioles, everywhere are mountains; Aimlessly I return from the stream, where I watched the clouds. Man's life does not allow unbroken ease, But to be able to be high up in the mountain, this is leisure.

Object facts

• Title: Streams and Mountains
• Date: 1372
• Creator attribution: Xu Ben (Chinese, 1335–1380)
• Culture: China, Yuan dynasty (1271–1368)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 92.2 x 37.6 cm (36 5/16 x 14 13/16 in.); Overall: 228 x 54.5 cm (89 3/4 x 21 7/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1997.96

A detail from the museum

An attendant opens a reed gate to welcome the scholar with a walking stick approaching the rustic retreat.

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. Chinese Landscape Painting. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1954.
• Sirén, Osvald. Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles. New York: Ronald Press, 1956.
• Qin, Zuyong, and Roger Goepper. Im Schatten Des Wu-T'ung-Baumes: [Gedanken Zur Malerei Von Ch'in Tsu-Yung]. Munchen: Hirmer, 1959.

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.