Tiger Family (late 1800s): Art, History and Details

Tiger Family (late 1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

In deep mountains, a tigress, two cubs, and a leopard welcome the early morning sun. This is not merely a playful scene but a well calculated image with symbols of longevity (pine trees), prosperity (tigress and cubs), and good fortune (leopard). Traditionally, on New Year’s Eve, the image of a fearsome-looking tiger was pasted on entrance doors to ward off evil spirits. Conventional Korean tiger paintings often include frolicking magpies, but here, the crimson sun is placed behind a majestic pine. Through the sunrise and the details of the felines’ skin shines the artist’s keen interest in creating a realistic atmosphere.

Object facts

• Title: Tiger Family
• Date: late 1800s
• Culture: Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 170 x 90.4 cm (66 15/16 x 35 9/16 in.); Overall: 262.5 x 115.1 cm (103 3/8 x 45 5/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Korean Art
• Accession number: 1997.148

A detail from the museum

A great number of tigers used to have live in the Korean peninsula. An old Chinese proverb says: “Korean people hunt tigers half of the year, and tigers hunt people other half of the year.”

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Major African Sculpture, Recent Mark Tansey Painting, and Other Works of Art Enter CMA Collection,” September 16, 1997, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Cunningham, Michael R., "Year of the Tiger", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 38 no. 04, April 1998.
• Sung, Hou-mei. Decoded Messages: The Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

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.