Old Pine Tree
Wen Zhengming (Chinese, 1470–1559)
late 1530s
- Medium
- handscroll; ink on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Painting: 28 x 139.3 cm (11 x 54 13/16 in.); Overall: 29.3 x 596.9 cm (11 9/16 x 235 in.)
- Culture
- China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Here the natural appearance of a gnarled and vine-entangled pine has been transformed into a rhythmic abstraction of brushstrokes and ink tonalities, with unifying opposites—opening and closing, rising and falling—that provide the design across the horizontal scroll. The artist's inscription reads: "The force of change beyond restraint; / The dragon's whiskers are likened to a forest of spears."
