1516
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Beggars and Street Characters is a 1516 unspecified by Shen Zhou, a Ming Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a scroll crowded with ragged people—some missing limbs, others hunched over sticks, all jostling for space. Zhou Chen lived in Suzhou, a wealthy city where beggars were so common they became part of the street noise. Instead of pity, his brush shows their sharp edges: a toothless grin, a claw-like hand. The painting might have been made for the New Year, when beggars performed for coins. Look up more paintings of china, ming dynasty (1368–1644) to see how artists pictured everyday life.
Zhou Chen from Suzhou provides rare depictions of impoverished people that once filled the city’s markets and streets. Despite Suzhou’s prosperity, its rapid growth polarized society, including the wealthy and those who had deserted their farmlands, who were without homes, unemployed, or sick. Amid these are figures who inspire fear rather than empathy. The painting may thus be informed by local practices at the end of the lunar year, in which street beggars, in exchange for food or money, would dress up like ghosts and demons to drive out evil forces.
Although Zhou Chen's original composition was an album of 24 figures, today it is mounted as two handscrolls, one in the Cleveland collection and one in the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Shen Zhou spent his life in the Suzhou region of China, where his family’s money and connections mattered more than art—until it did.
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