Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Four Elders of Mt. Shang
Kano Tan’yū (Japanese, 1602–1674)
1600s
- Medium
- One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 161 x 339 cm (63 3/8 x 133 7/16 in.)
- Culture
- Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Japanese Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Osborne and Gratia Hauge and Victor and Takako Hauge
- 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
The Kano school was a group of professional artists patronized by the shogun from the late Muromachi period to the Edo period. The group adopted themes of reclusiveness to convey the importance of loyalty to the shogunate. A leader of the Edo Kano school, Kano Tanyu paired Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and Four Elders of Mt. Shang to reference a painting of the same theme attributed to Kano Motonobu. Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove refers to the elites who escaped the social chaos of China’s Wei-Jin period (AD 200s–400s); they fled to a secluded bamboo grove where they could express themselves freely, enjoying pure conversation, music, and wine. The other screen, Four Elders of Mt. Shang, depicts the scholars who left the turbulence of the late Qin dynasty to pursue their scholarly interests in seclusion on Mt. Shang in Shanxi province.
