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Landscape

Unknown

1704

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Baroque 18th Century Landscape

Dominant colour

Landscape is a 1704 unspecified by Unknown, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1704 · Baroque
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a quiet ink painting of a bamboo grove around a small wooden studio. The artist copied an old Chinese idea: a poem written above the scene. The words talk about a scholar’s garden, turning simple bamboo into a symbol of wisdom. This mix of picture and poem was common in Japan’s Zen temples long before this painting was made. Look up *Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)* to see more works like this.

The story of this work

Overview

This composition was fashioned after works created by Zen clerics of the Muromachi period (1392–1573), who often added their original Chinese-style poems above an ink painting to make a hanging scroll called a shigajiku . The poems here quote from essays on Sima Guang (1019–1086) by the Chinese Song dynasty literatus Su Shi (1037–1101). They interpret the studio surrounded with bamboo as a metaphor for the garden of Sima, the Song dynasty scholar-official who, in imitation of the Tang poet Bai Juyi, enjoyed the garden in isolation during his exile in Luoyang.

Read the full account in the museum source.