Carts on a Winding Mountain Road
Framed: 77 × 42 1/2 inches (195.58 × 107.95 cm)
Chinese Landscape Painting, Cleveland Museum of Art, November 4-December 26, 1954.
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. 256.
Chinese Ming Painting, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, May 12, - August 29, 1993.
Mountains, Rocks, Landscapes, and Gardens: The Essence of East Asian Painting, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 15 - September 14, 1997.
Landscapes East | Landscapes West: Representing Nature from Mount Fuji to Canyon de Chelly, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, August 27, 2011- February 26, 2012.
In the autumn of the jiaxu year [1694], I painted after the idea of Guo Heyang’s Picture of Traveling Cart for the appreciation of the Old Gentleman Yu in his old year.
Yuan Jiang depicted travelers in a towering mountain terrain, referencing Old Gentleman Yu’s career as a governor. In the lower left, two ox carts enter the mountain through a winding path. The cart in front carries a woman and her children. Behind them is a second ox cart, and we can imagine the woman’s husband, perhaps Old Gentleman Yu, sitting inside. The path winds past local villagers to the top left of the mountain, where an opening city gate welcomes the governor. Yuan Jiang honored Yu by using a blue and green landscape, signifying that this beautiful country was under Yu’s good governance.
Purchased through Laurence Sickman by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1933.
Osvald Sirén, A History of Early Chinese Painting, vol.II (London: The Medici Society, 1933), 76-77.
Osvald Sirén, Kinas konst under tre Årtusenden, vol. II (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1942), II: pl. 138.
Hugo Munsterberg, Landscape Painting of China and Japan (Rutland, 1955), pl. 67.
Osvald Sirén, Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, vol. VI (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1958), Part II, VI: pl. 334.
Laurence Sickman, and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture of China, The Pelican History of Art, ed. Nikolaus Pevsner, (Harmondsworth, 1956), 194, pl.146.
Sherman E. Lee, Chinese Landscape painting, Exh. cat: Cleveland museum of Art (1962), 104, no. 83.
James Cahill, “Yuan Chiang and his School” Ars Orientalis (vol. V (1963), V: 259-272, fig 9, 17.
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): 348-349, no. 256.
Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), fig. 45.
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), 329.
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), 371, fig. 271.
