Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Saying Farewell at Xunyang (Song of the Pipa)
Wen Boren (Chinese, 1502–1575)
1500s
- Medium
- handscroll; ink and color on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 27 x 271.3 cm (10 5/8 x 106 13/16 in.); Painting only: 21 x 60 cm (8 1/4 x 23 5/8 in.)
- Culture
- China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
- 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
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This handscroll depicts The Song of the Pipa, a poem by Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846) written after the poet’s encounter with a pipa player on the Yangzi River. Expelled from her home city when her beauty and fame had faded, she played for the poet at night. Her musical performance and tragic life story resonated with Bai Juyi, who had just been demoted and exiled from life at court himself. The hazy, vast view and pale color tonalities of this painting illustrate these feelings of endless sadness, having lost one’s sense of purpose in life.
