Willows (1100s): Art, History and Details

Willows (1100s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A single scholar in a skiff drifts beneath shade-giving willows and savors his view of mountain peaks just emerging from the pervasive river mist. Round lotus leaves and vertical marsh reeds join with the dotted grasses and curving willow leaves to provide considerable textural variety within the foreground area, which contrasts with the more irregular texturing of the distant mountains. Misty space plays an active part in the composition, and the components of the painting are organized around bisecting diagonals.

Object facts

• Title: Willows
• Date: 1100s
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: album leaf; ink and light color on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 23.8 x 25.1 cm (9 3/8 x 9 7/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1985.365

A detail from the museum

This river scene features low-lying spits of land surrounded by lotuses and bands of mist floating amid overhanging willows.

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.
• Cunningham, Michael R. “Painting the Poetry of the Natural World.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 7 (September 1988): 279–291.
• Griswold, William, Xiaofei Tian, Richard Von Glahn, Feng Zhao, S. J. Vainker, Masaaki Itakura, Jiang Wu, et al. China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta. Edited by Clarissa Von Spee. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

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.