Woman Holding Plum Blossoms (mid-700s): Art, History and Details

Woman Holding Plum Blossoms (mid-700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Tang figurines placed in the tombs give a vivid picture of everyday life. Images of elegant ladies in various hairstyles, costumes, and activities suggest the fashion of the time. This example of a plump and flamboyant lady is a common type found in mid-8th-century tombs, especially in the cosmopolitan city of Xi'an. Together with other figurines—court officials, musicians, dancers, hunters, foreign travelers, horses, camels, guardian warriors, and guardian animals—such tomb sculptures accompanied the deceased in the afterlife.

Object facts

• Title: Woman Holding Plum Blossoms
• Date: mid-700s
• Culture: North China, Tang dynasty (618-907)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: earthenware covered in white slip with traces of pigment
• Dimensions: Overall: 43.8 x 16.5 x 12.2 cm (17 1/4 x 6 1/2 x 4 13/16 in.)
• Collection: China - Tang Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1987.13

A detail from the museum

Tang aristocratic women had a high degree of freedom, especially in contrast with the Neo-Confucianism of the later Song dynasty.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Bickford, Maggie. Bones of jade, soul of ice: the flowering plum in Chinese art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1985.
• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1987.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 75, no. 2, 1988, pp. 30–71.
• "Principales Acquisitions des Musées en 1987." Gazette des Beaux Arts, Mars 1988, Vol. 111, Issue 130, pp. 1-56.

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.