Bamboo in Moonlight
1500s
- Medium
- hanging scroll; ink on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Painting only: 85.2 x 33.5 cm (33 9/16 x 13 3/16 in.); Overall: 163 x 43.2 cm (64 3/16 x 17 in.)
- Culture
- Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Korean 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
This painting depicts the full moon shining through a stand of bamboo, and for Joseon literati it would have conveyed the sense of life in harmony with nature to which they aspired. As one of the "four gentlemen" along with plum trees, orchids, and chrysanthemums, bamboo, which has immense flexibility, allowing it bent to extremes without breaking—symbolize a gentleman's noble virtue. Here, the painter depicted the shining moon rising above a bamboo tree to create a meditative nightly scene.
