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Flowers and Rocks
1368–1644
- Medium
- hanging scroll; color on silk
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 162.6 x 48.6 cm (64 x 19 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Charles L. Freer
- 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 painter uses delicate brushwork and vivid colors to depict an early summer scene of three kinds of flowers growing beside a garden rock: From top to bottom we see flowering pomegranate, then peonies, and lilies below. Like the peony, which conveys wishes for wealth and prosperity, the pomegranate flower, here in festive red color turning soon into fruit with many seeds, is associated with the wish for many sons. The lily, in Chinese "baihe," is a homophone with the pun "togetherness for a hundred years," expressing wishes for harmony and unity. The scroll would have made a suitable gift to married women.
