Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Conversation in Autumn
Hua Yan (Chinese, 1682–c. 1765)
1732
- Medium
- Hanging scroll; ink and light color on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 218.5 x 71.7 cm (86 x 28 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Two figures sit conversing in a thatched cottage. This painting illustrates two poetic lines:
My guest came to sit beyond the dust, In a narrow room, we talked about the autumnal sounds of autumn.
Hua Yan presented an intimate world—simple and rustic—amid a landscape. The cool wilderness depicted in this work conveys an aloofness that may reveal the inner world of a scholar-artist who failed the civil service examination but preserved a sense of pride and endurance in his humble surroundings.
