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Landscape

Photo: Elizabeth Mann

Landscape

1561

Wen Boren

Chinese, 1502 - 1575

This hilly lake scene imagining the Suzhou region of southeast China is done in a delicately brushed and subtly inked style typical of the brilliant painter Wen Boren. Friends meeting for a chat is a subject that would have resonated with Suzhou’s educated and upper classes—a tight social network of intellectuals, poets, artists, and musicians that comprised Wen Boren’s audience. He mastered a variety of landscape styles and was also known for brightly colored, decorative scenes of imaginary immortal worlds. He studied painting with his celebrated uncle, Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), whose calligraphic masterwork is in the next gallery. Both were pillars of the “Wu School” of amateur scholar-painters.
Ink and light color on paper
Overall: 95 3/16 x 22 1/4 in. (241.8 x 56.5 cm)
Image: 50 7/16 x 15 1/16in. (128.1 x 38.3 cm)
Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection
51.133
Provenance: Nagao Uzan (kō) (長尾雨山/長尾甲) 1864-1942; Tejirō Yamamoto 山本悌二郎 (1870-1937); Howard C. Hollis
Photo: Elizabeth Mann
location
Not currently on view

Resources

Exhibition HistoryDetroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts, The Arts of the Ming Dynasty, 1952.

Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Landscape Painting, 1954.

Portland, Oregon, Portlan Art Museum, Chinese Paintings, 1956.

Munich, Germany, Haus der Kunst Munich, 1000 Years of Chinese Painting, 1959 (Zurich, Switzerland, 1960; The Hague, The Netherlands, 1960; Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1960).

Utica, New York, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Museum of Art, Masters of Landscape: East and West, Sept. 15 - Oct. 13, 1963 (Rochester, New York, Rochester Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Nov. 1 - Dec. 1, 1963).

Memphis, Tennessee, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, The Literati Vision: Sixteenth Century Wu School Painting and Calligraphy, Sept.14 - Oct. 28, 1984 (Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Art Museum, Dec. 2, 1984 - Jan. 27, 1985).

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Chinese Art: A Seattle Perspective, Dec. 22, 2007 - July 26, 2009.

Tokyo, Japan, Suntory Museum of Art, Luminous Jewels: Masterpieces of Asian Art From the Seattle Art Museum, July 25 - Sept. 6, 2009 (Kobe, Japan, Kobe City Museum, Sept. 19 - Dec. 6, 2009; Kofu, Japan, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, Dec. 23, 2009 - Feb. 28, 2010; Atami, Japan, MOA Museum of Art, Mar. 13 - May 9, 2010; Fukuoka, Japan, Fukuoka Art Museum, May 23 - July 19, 2010).

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Boundless: Stories of Asian Art, Feb. 8, 2020 - ongoing [on view Feb. 8, 2020 - July 11, 2021].
Published ReferencesKawai, Masatomo, Yasuhiro Nishioka, Yukiko Sirahara, editors, Luminous Jewels: Masterpieces of Asian Art from the Seattle Art Museum, The Yomiuri Shimbun, 2009, cat. #85.

Toda, Teisuke and Hiromitsu Ogawa. Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue of Chinese Paintings: Second Series. (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1998), see: I-362& I-268, cat. #A55-050.

Turner, Jane, The Dictionary of Art, vol. 33, (New York: Grove, 1996): 70.

Seattle Art Museum, Selected Works, (Seattle, Washington: The Museum, 1991): 166.

Hyland, Alice R. M. The Literati Vision: Sixteenth Century Wu School Painting and Calligraphy. ([Memphis, Tenn.]: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 1984): 64, cat. no. 36.

Henry Trubner, William. Jay. Rathbun, Catherine A. Kaputa, Asiatic Art in the Seattle Art Museum: A Selection and Catalogue, (Seattle: The Museum, 1973), p.186 #151 (color plate: 60).

Goepper, Roger. Chinesische Malerei; die jungere Tradition. (Bern: Hallwag. [see folder] 1967).

Thomas, Edward B. "Oriental Art in the Seattle Art Museum," in Art in America, no. 1, 1965, illus. p. 58

Sullivan, Michael, Chinese and Japanese art, (New York, F. Watts, 1965): 186, 263.

Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute. Masters of landscape: East and West, 1963, p. 13, no. 7.

Munich, Haus der Kunst, 1000 Jahre Chinesische Malerei, cat., 1959, no. 56: 98, 99.

Brown, John Mason, Ladies Home Journal, (New York: Simon and Schuster, Dec. 1955): 11.

Lee, Sherman E., Chinese Landscape Painting, (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1954), no. 57, pp. 83, 85, 102, 151.

Detroit Institute of Arts, The Arts of the Ming Dynasty. ([Detroit] 1952), no. 32, fig.: 14.

http://chinesepainting.seattleartmuseum.org/OSCI/

Giuffrida, Noelle. Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee's Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018; p. 66, reproduced fig. 37.

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