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Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Kings of Hells: Leaf 29
1200s
- Medium
- Album; ink on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Painting: 34 x 38.4 cm (13 3/8 x 15 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund in honor of Dr. Ju-hsi Chou and Gift of various donors to the department of Asian Art (by exchange)
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This leaf belongs to the album’s second series of narratives, Ten Kings of Hells. It demonstrates a Chinese-Buddhist approach in which the netherworld is divided into ten realms, each ruled by one of these kings. This particular version portrays the king in a benevolent guise, though his identity remains unclear. He is draped in a robe and holds an ivory plaque. A vertical scroll hangs to his left, depicting in the lower two-thirds a rectangular architectural plan with buildings aligned in a symmetrical arrangement not unlike a Buddhist temple or a Confucian shrine. Above, the scene also features a building and could show a specific mountain. One of the Ten Kings is known as the King of Taishan (or Mt. Tai). This depiction would represent a unique treatment of the king, not shared with other renditions of the same figure elsewhere.
