Zhi and Xu's Pure Conversation (1643): Art, History and Details

Zhi and Xu's Pure Conversation (1643) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Lan Ying (Chinese, 1585–after 1664).

The work and its context

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

Lan Ying’s painting is a gift to his friend, the Chan monk Wuyun, in which he depicted two sages of the Six Dynasties period: the Buddhist monk Zhidun (314–366 CE), and the Daoist priest Xu Xun (265–420 CE). Meant to be understood as an analogy of the friendship between artist and monk, the painting also offered a retreat into the past, a year before the fall of the Ming dynasty. A professional painter born in Hangzhou, Lan Ying is traditionally considered a last representative of the Zhe school. Lan wrote poetic inscriptions and interacted with the literatus Chen Jiru (1558–1639).

Object facts

• Title: Zhi and Xu's Pure Conversation
• Date: 1643
• Creator attribution: Lan Ying (Chinese, 1585–after 1664)
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 141 x 56 cm (55 1/2 x 22 1/16 in.); Overall with knobs: 246 x 80 cm (96 7/8 x 31 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1970.128

A detail from the museum

This painting serves as an analogy of the friendship between artist and monk.

Collection credit

Gift of Stephen O. K. Chen

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cheng, Qi 程琦. Xuanhuitang shuhua lu [萱暉堂書畫錄 = Paintings and calligraphy in the collection of Hsüan-hui-tʻang]. Hong Kong: Xuanhuitang, 1972.
• Lee, Sherman E. The Colors of Ink: Chinese Paintings and Related Ceramics from the Cleveland Museum of Art. [New York]: Asia Society; distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1974.
• 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.