Cleveland Museum of Art
Dragon and Tiger
Sesson ShūkeiLinkedCulture matchlcp-b56ed7bf3266
- Date
- c. 1546–56
- Medium
- One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink on paper
- Culture
- Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573) to Momoyama period (1573–1615)
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 135593
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
In Chinese cosmology, dragons produce rain clouds. The dragon disappearing into and reemerging from clouds in this painting seems to generate rough waves in the water below, pulling it toward the sky. The shape of the foreground wave is indirectly sampled from a painting by 13th-century Chinese painter Yujian, a handscroll once owned by the Ashikaga military rulers of Japan. Sesson must have known the famous painting though copies, and made a copy of his own. Here, the wave reinforces the powerful quality of the dragon. Sesson's dragon, winding in and out of clouds, may have taken inspiration from Chinese Ming-dynasty works in the style of 13th-century Chinese painter Chen Rong.
The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Provenance
- H. Mitsui; C. Satomi. | ?-1959: (Howard Hollis and Co., Cleveland, OH, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) | 1959-: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, 1959-present
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Cleveland Museum of Art and other institutions.