Travelers in Snow-Covered Mountains
Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, Nelson-Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, November 7, 1980 – January 4, 1981; The Cleveland Museum of Art, February 7 – April 5, 1981; The Asia Society, December 3, 1981 – February 28, 1982; Tokyo National Museum, October 4 – November 17, 1982, no. 9.
Possibly found in Shanxi, China, February 1939 [1];
With Otto Burchard, Peking, by April 1939-1940;
Purchased from Burchard by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1940.
NOTES:
[1] The circumstances of this painting’s modern discovery are currently unknown. Previously-published descriptions of its provenance, based on personal recollections [see especially Hay (2008) and Wai-Kam Ho, et al (c. 1980)] led to the confusion that the painting was discovered by Nelson-Atkins Curator Laurence Sickman, but documentation in the Nelson-Atkins Archives indicates this is not the case. Rather, the Nelson-Atkins purchased the painting from dealer Otto Burchard, who was told by another unnamed dealer that the painting “was excavated about two months ago in Shansi.” Burchard had the painting restored in China prior to its sale to the Nelson-Atkins. See letters from Otto Burchard to Laurence Sickman, dated April 26 and September 16, 1939, Nelson-Atkins Archives, MSS001, Laurence Sickman Papers, Box 1a, folder 31.
Hugo Munsterberg, Landscape Painting of China and Japan (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1955), 42, pl. 23.
Osvald Siren, The Chinese on the Art of Painting, 2nd. ed. (New York: 1963), pl. IV.
Terukazu Akiyama, et al., eds. Chugoku bijutsu (Chinese art in Western collections), (Tokyo: 1972) Vol. II, Kaiga (paintings): v. I, ed. By Kei Suzuki and Teisuke Toda, 217, pl. II
Ross E. Taggart, George L. McKenna, and Marc F. Wilson, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. II, Art of the Orient. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 49.
Iriya, Barnhart, Nakad, To Gen Kyonen Vol. 2, Bunjinga Zui-hen.. (Tokyo: Chuo-koronsha, 1977), 18-19, color pls. 12-13.
Hiroshi Sofukawa, “Go-dai Hoku So shoki sansui-ga no ichi kosatsu” (An inquiry into Five Dynasties and early Northern Sung landscape painting). Toho gakuho, no. 419 (Feb, 1977), 184-200, pl. 2.
Michael Sullivan, Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China (Stanford: Stanford university Press, 1979), 60, fig. 32.
Max Loehr, The Great Painters of China (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1980), 86, fig. 43.
Kei Suzuki History of Chinese Painting, 2 vols (Tokyo: 1980), 94, no. 107.
Wai-Kam Ho, et al., Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art. (The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, c1980), 12-13, no. 9.
Chinese Fine Arts, vol. 3 (Kyoto: Tankosha Pub. Co., 1981), 180, color pl. 42.
Museum, ed. Tokyo National Museum, no. 379 (October 1982), pl. 9.
Kei Suzuki, Chungguo huihua shi, trans Wei Meiyue (Taipei, 1987), pl. 107.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 314.
Jonathan Hay, ‘ Travellers in Snow- Covered Mountains’: A Reassessment, Orientations, Special issue for the Chinese art collection in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Vol. 39, no. 8 (November/December 2008):85-91.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 333, fig. 156.
