Cleveland Museum of Art
Autumn Excursion from Album of Illustrations for the Tale of Genji
- Date
- 1600s
- Medium
- painting in an accordion-style album; ink, light color, and gold on paper
- Culture
- Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 448034
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
This album contains illustrations for the classic literary work the Tale of Genji, authored in the 1000s by Murasaki Shikibu, an aristocrat of the Heian period (794–1185) court. The scenes are painted in the “white drawing” ( hakubyō ) mode, in which a fine ink line is used to depict figures and spaces with great subtlety, punctuated only occasionally by traces of red pigment for a character’s lips, a detail of a garment, or a decorative element. These two scenes illustrate episodes from the chapters “Thin Veil of Cloud” (Usugumo) and “Barrier Gate” (Sekiya). The illustrations are identified by chapter title in cartouches to the upper right of the paintings.
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Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Gift of Vera Sterne in memory of her husband, Maurice Sterne
- Provenance
- ?–1961: Mrs. Maurice [Vera Segal] Sterne [1904–c. 1965], Mount Kisco, NY, given to the Cleveland Museum of Art | 1961–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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