Hunting Falcon Attacking a Swan
Denver Art Museum, March 1937.
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Gallery, April 1937.
Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, November 1948.
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla., January 1952.
Chinese Paintings of Birds and Flowers, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, October 30-December 14, 1951.
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. 119.
Decoded Messages: The Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 9, 2009 – January 3, 2010. no. 8.
White feathers fly through the air as a swan desperately flees from a fierce hunting falcon, whose leash has just been just released. Chinese people have long associated falcons with warrior power and often depicted them in court paintings. In the Yuan Dynasty, the falcon may have signified a militant aggressor, such as the Mongol people, who conquered the Song Dynasty (960–1279).
Dr. Herbert Mueller (1885-1966), by September 27, 1932 [1];
Purchased from Mueller, through Laurence Sickman, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1933.
NOTES:
[1] Herbert Mueller was a German who built a collection of Chinese art while living in Peiping (modern-day Beijing) in the 1920s-30s. See letter from Laurence Sickman to Langdon Warner, Harvard University Pusey Library, Langdon Warner Personal Archive, HUG4872.1010, box 12, folder 20, copies in Nelson-Atkins curatorial file.
Kin-tai no boku-e, vol. 2 (Kodansha, 1975), 151, pl.126-127.
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):144, no. 119.
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), 321.
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), 349, fig. 204.
Hou-mei Sung, Decoded Messages: The Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting, and Cincinnati Art Museum (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2009), 23, no. 8
