White-Robed Guanyin (late 1200s): Art, History and Details

White-Robed Guanyin (late 1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Zhang Yuehu (Chinese, active 1200s).

The work and its context

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

The figure here sits on a rocky elevation representing Potalaka in the Southern Sea, Avalokitesvara’s island home. A vase with a bamboo sprig holds pure water, the nectar of life. Bamboo shines through the figure’s halo, a way of seeing the illusionary world through the Buddhist truth. Avalokitesvara (Guanyin in Chinese), the bodhisattva of compassion, was integrated into the Chan Buddhist canon of venerated beings. In this context, the bodhisattva is often depicted in its female manifestation as the White-Robed Guanyin. The worship of the feminine White-Robed Guanyin has its origins on Mount Tianzhu in Hangzhou, where Qian Liu (852–932), ruler of the Wuyue kingdom, established the Upper Tianzhu Monastery to venerate her image.

Object facts

• Title: White-Robed Guanyin
• Date: late 1200s
• Creator attribution: Zhang Yuehu (Chinese, active 1200s)
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 104.5 x 42.2 cm (41 1/8 x 16 5/8 in.); Overall with knobs: 195.4 x 61.8 cm (76 15/16 x 24 5/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1972.160

A detail from the museum

As an artist, Zhang Yuehu was better known in Japan than in his own country.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Mayuyama, Junkichi 繭山順吉. Mayuyama, Seventy Years [Ryūsen shūhō: sōgyō shichijusshūnen kinen = 龍泉集芳 : 創業七十周年記念]. Tōkyō: Mayuyama Ryūsendō 繭山龍泉堂, 1976.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• 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.

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.