Collection Online as of February 3, 2023

View of West Lake

1700s

Ike Taiga 池大雅

(Japanese, 1723–1776)

Japan, Edo period

(1615-1868)

Hanging scroll; ink and light color on paper

Overall: 170 x 140.2 cm (66 15/16 x 55 3/16 in.); Painting only: 64.2 x 133.1 cm (25 1/4 x 52 3/8 in.)

John L. Severance Fund 1970.69

Location

not on view

Description

West Lake near Hangzhou, China, was a place favored by the Korean and Japanese elite, even though they had never been there. West Lake is legendary for famous Chinese poets: Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846) and Song scholar Su Shi (1037–1101) lived in its vicinity, and the Song poet Lin Bu (967–1028) led a reclusive life, having cranes and plum blossoms as his only companions on Solitary Hill near the lake. Landscape paintings of West Lake gained in popularity in Japan as early as the Muromachi period. In the Edo period, Ike Taiga, a founding literati painter, challenged himself to depict West Lake in hanging scroll format by transforming an image from a 1633 Chinese woodblock print, Tianxia mingshan tu (Famous Mountains in China) for this work.

Inscriptions

Inscription

upper right: inscription and signature, two seals of artist.

Provenance

?–1970

(Yanagi Fine Art Shop, Kyoto, Japan, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art)

1970–

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Citations

Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1970.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 58, no. 2 (1971): 22–71. Mentioned: no. 120, p. 60; Reproduced: no. 120, p. 69 www.jstor.org

Sŏn, Sŭng-hye. The Lure of Painted Poetry: Japanese and Korean Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011. Mentioned and reproduced: pp. 43–44, cat. no. 21

Exhibition history

Year in Review: 1970. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (February 10-March 7, 1971).

Masterworks of Wood: China and Japan. Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (organizer) (November 4-December 5, 1976); Asia House Galleries, New York City, NY (January 13-March 27, 1977).

Visions of Landscape: East and West. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (February 17-March 21, 1982).

Suibokuga: Japanese Ink Painting. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 1, 1985-February 24, 1986).

Asian Autumn: Splendid Variety: 18th-Century Art in Japan. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 16, 1993-March 6, 1994).

The Lure of Painted Poetry: Cross-cultural Text and Image in Korean and Japanese Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (April 15-August 21, 2011).