Susuki Grass (c. 1525): Art, History and Details

Susuki Grass (c. 1525) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Susuki grass has a seasonal association with autumn in the Japanese visual and literary tradition. It is one of the “Seven Flowers of Autumn,” along with bush clover, arrowroot, pink, patrinia, mistflower, and bellflower. This composition immerses the beholder in a field of grasses and golden bands of mist. The design may have served as a backdrop for poems brushed in ink on decorated papers and attached to the surface of the screens, a practice with a long tradition in Japan.

Object facts

• Title: Susuki Grass
• Date: c. 1525
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink, color, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 150.4 x 349.2 cm (59 3/16 x 137 1/2 in.); Overall: 163.6 x 362.4 cm (64 7/16 x 142 11/16 in.); with frame: 166.8 x 365.6 cm (65 11/16 x 143 15/16 in.); Panorama: 163.6 x 60.4 cm (64 7/16 x 23 3/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1984.43.2

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cunningham, Michael R. The Triumph of Japanese Style: 16th-Century Art in Japan. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with the Indiana University Press, 1991.
• Bromfield, David. Monet & Japan. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2001.
• Cunningham, Michael R. Unfolding Beauty: Japanese Screens from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

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.