Rose Mallows
Tokyo National Museum, October 5 – November 17, 1982.
In this hanging scroll, rose mallows, which symbolize longevity, grow next to a tall rock in a garden. In the inscription at the top left, Shen Zhou dedicates this painting and the included poem to an old friend:
For ten years I had not seen Gengyunweng;
White hair at his temples but his face young as a child’s.
His elder son assisted him to the city to buy medicine,
Wishing to test the efficacy of ground cinnabar.
On the fifth day of the fifth month, I encountered them,
And as we drank,
I painted for him this stalk of mallow scarlet.
I hope he will view this flower each year,
The square pupil of longevity, his for three hundred cycles.
Yamamoto Teijiro (1870-1937), by 1937 [1];
With Michelangelo Piacentini (d. 2005), Tokyo, by 1949 [2];
Purchased from Piacentini by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1949.
NOTES: [1] Yamamoto Teijiro was a Japanese politician, businessman and collector, whose remaining collection later made up the core of the Chokaido Museum in Japan. [2] Piacentini was an Italian art historian based in Tokyo after the Second World War. He studied Italian Renaissance art, while collecting and dealing in Asian objects.
Omura Seigai, Bunjin gasen (Tokyo, 1921-1922), vol. I, pl. 2.
Torajiro Naito, comp. Min shitaika gafu [Paintings by the four great masters of the Ming Dynasty] (Osaka, 1924), pl. 21.
To-So-Gen-Min meiga taikan [Catalogue of an exhibition of Chinese paintings of the Tang, Sung, yuan, and Ming dynasties] (Tokyo Imperial Museum, 1930), pl. 254.
I-lin Yueh-K’an, (1932), 15, no. 33.
Yamamoto Teijiro, comp. Chokaido shoga mokuruku [Chinese calligraphy and painting in the collection of Yamamoto Teijrio] (Tokyo 1932), ch. 2, 104-105.
Kinjiro Harada, Shina meiga Hokan [The pageant of Chinese painting] (Tokyo: The Otsuka-kogeisha, Shōwa 1936), pl. 496.
Harada Bizan, comp. Nihon genzai shina meiga mokuroku [Chinese paintings now in Japan] (Tokyo, 1938), 144.
Richard Edwards, The Field of stones: A Study of the Art of Shen Chou ( 1427-1509) Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Oriental studies no. 5 ( Washington: 1962), pl. 44A.
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), 62.
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), 177-178, no. 149.
Shigeo Nakamura, Chin Shu-jin to geijutsu [Shen Chou, the man and his art] (Bunkado Shoten: Kyoto, 1982), 82, no. 26.
