Tea Drinking Under the Wutong Tree
Tang Yin (Chinese, 1470-1523)
Ming dynasty (1369–1644), 1509
- Medium
- Handscroll; ink and slight color on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 23.4 × 332.8 cm (9 3/16 × 131 in.)
- Culture
- China
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Asia
- Credit line
- Kate S. Buckingham Endowment Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Generations of Chinese intellectuals and Buddhist monks honed the practice of tea tasting into a high art form. The "bamboo stove" —a carrying case that contained a ceramic kettle used for heating water—was central to the process of tea preparation. This ingenious device, fanned by a servant in the center of this painting, was the subject of a poem by Wu Kuan (1435-1504), a close friend of Tang Yin. In this composition, Wu appears on a low platform with a teapot and a scroll by his side. He shared the tea ceremony with a Buddhist monk, while another servant draws fresh water from a nearby stream.
Five years after Wu Kuan's death, Tang Yin executed this delicate vignette in the writer's memory. The first colophon was written by Zhu Yunming (1461-1527), a famous poet and calligrapher who exchanged tea-related verses with Mr. Wu. Such commemorative paintings provide poignant records of Chinese intellectual and cultured society.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
