Water Village (1570): Art, History and Details

Water Village (1570) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Wen Boren (Chinese, 1502–1575).

The work and its context

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

In the autumn of 1570, Wen Boren painted this seemingly unemotional scene of low-lying marshlands with a chain of rounded mountains in the background. A fishing boat is nestled on the shore near the village. Although paths and bridges traverse the landscape, only two people are visible in the stillness. From the restrained atmosphere of this landscape, one would never guess that Wen Boren was known as the “bad boy” of the Wu School for his explosive temper. As a younger man, he was even embroiled in a contentious lawsuit with his own uncle, Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), a master of Ming dynasty painting with whom he had trained. The ideal of the scholar-painter, or literati, was that an artist’s moral character is reflected in his paintings, so there was great incongruity between Wen Boren’s difficult personality and his restrained landscapes. A contemporary, Wang Shizhen, wrote this about him: "This gentleman is prone to behave odiously and screamed accusations at people. How is it possible for him to carry in his bosom such a wealth of scenic wonders?" Who knows what effort it took to subdue his fractious spirit to project an image of coolness and refined taste in his paintings?

Object facts

• Title: Water Village
• Date: 1570
• Creator attribution: Wen Boren (Chinese, 1502–1575)
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: handscroll; ink and light color on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 26.7 x 183 cm (10 1/2 x 72 1/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1985.370

A detail from the museum

A foreground tree has an eccentric twisting silhouette and pepper-dot "halo" of leaves.

Collection credit

The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• Suzuki, Kei 鈴木敬. Chūgoku kaiga sōgō zuroku [中國繪畫總合圖錄 = Comprehensive Illustrated Catalog of Chinese Paintings]. Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1982.
• Lee, Sherman E. “A. Kelvin Smith (1899-1984): Collector.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 7 (September 1988): 240–243.

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.