Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Man, Buffalo, and Calf
Li You (Chinese, active c. 1145)
1145
- Medium
- album leaf; ink and color on silk
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Image: 25 x 26.7 cm (9 13/16 x 10 1/2 in.); with mat: 33.3 x 40.5 cm (13 1/8 x 15 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase 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
Here, a herdboy tending a cow with a calf is sitting beneath a tree with his pet myna bird. The painting can be read as a pastoral scene. As the water buffalo helped plow the fields, it was perceived as an animal that endures hard work without gain for itself, often interpreted as a metaphor for the official.
Ox-herding pictures, presented as gifts in court circles, were used for their moral and political rhetoric. The Yijing (Book of Changes) states, The Receptive is the earth, the mother . . . it is a cow with a calf . . . the multitude [in relation to the ruler].
