The Cleveland Museum of Art
Collection Online as of December 18, 2025
Brush Holder with Figures in Landscape and Poetic Inscription by Wang Meilin from Jiading
1800s
Location: 240B Chinese Decorative Arts
Did You Know?
Bamboo was considered a humble material that suited the Confucian ideals of frugality and modesty.Description
This bamboo brush holder shows a scholar inside a mountain retreat under trees. On its back side, a cliff inscribed with a text by the Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846) describes the carefree life of a scholar among family and servants in the countryside.The text in cursive script style calligraphy (xingshu) says:
A ten-acre [home], a five-acre yard with a water pool, and a thousand bamboos. Don’t say the field is narrow, or the location remote. It is enough to accommodate the knee and rest the shoulder. It has a hall and a yard, a bridge and a boat. It has books and wine, songs and string [instruments]. An old man in the midst of it, his white beard flowing. [He] is moderate and satisfied, has no demands and needs. Like a bird he chooses a branch, builds a nest, and rests at ease. Like a fish in a swamp, that does not know how wide the ocean is. . . . All I like, lies before me. I drink a cup of wine from time to time, recite a [poem], wife and children play, chicken and dogs are at leisure, and I will grow old here.
- ?–1988(Masaaki Yoshida, Kyoto, Japan, sold to to the Cleveland Museum of Art)1988–The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
- "The Year in Review for 1988." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 76, no. 2 (1989): 30-75. Referenced: cat. no. 211, p. 74, Reproduced: p. 209 www.jstor.org
- Power and Possession: Chinese Calligraphy and Inscribed Objects – Chinese Gallery Rotation 240a, 241c. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (August 13, 2018-February 3, 2019).Scholar's Studio. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (September 19-December 17, 1989).The Year in Review for 1988. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (March 1-May 14, 1989).
- {{cite web|title=Brush Holder with Figures in Landscape and Poetic Inscription by Wang Meilin from Jiading|url=false|author=Wang Meilin|year=1800s|access-date=18 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}
Source URL:
https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1988.75