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Bilang Lake
Song Xu (Chinese, 1525-c. 1606)
c. 1588
- Medium
- Album leaf; ink and color on silk
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 26.4 x 28.4 cm (10 3/8 x 11 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- China, Jiaxing, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- The Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase 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
By the 1500s, visits to historic and scenic sites in the lower Yangzi delta stimulated an increase of printed illustrated travel books. Topographical depictions of local scenery flourished.
Leaves from this album illustrates sites around Lake Tai of the two adjacent counties Changxing and Wuxing (modern Huzhou). Song Xu, who lived intermittently in Jiaxing and Songjiang, must have passed through Wuxing by boat and thus knew the region.
The paintings are inscribed with gazetteerlike notations, suggesting that the album was produced for clients as commemorative works, a travel guide, or for “armchair travel” (woyou) in one’s mind.
