Cleveland Museum of Art

Calligraphy (reverse)

Date

late 1800s

Medium

Ten-panel folding screen affixed with album leaves (obverse), calligraphy (reverse), ink and color on silk

Culture

Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910)

Department

Korean Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

The front of this screen features an assortment of subjects: birds and flowers, landscapes, and scenes of everyday life, mostly in monochromatic ink with light colors. The screen’s reverse side conveys a number of classical poems about the fleeting beauty of the four seasons. Traditionally, only one side of a folding screen bears painted or embroidered images, since these were used as a background furnishing. In Korean houses by the 1800s and early 1900s, however, two-sided folding screens became noticeably popular, possibly inspired by Japanese double-sided folding screens, which mainly served as room dividers in Japanese households. A calligrapher has brushed several Chinese poems about the four seasons on the reverse side, among them "Composing in the Daytime of Summer" by Tang poet Liu Zongyuan (773–819) and "Composing when Spring Begins" by Song scholar Zhang Shi (1133–1180).

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