Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryAlbum of Landscape Paintings Illustrating Old Poems: Man with a Staff Admires Chrysanthemums at a Fence
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Follow the old man’s staff and his gaze, then find the orange chrysanthemums growing by the low fence at the lower right.
Another leaf from the same album evokes the poet and recluse Tao Yuanming (365 to 427), whose poem Drinking Wine has him picking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence and gazing calmly at the southern mountains. An old man with a staff walks among bare trees, with orange chrysanthemums by a low fence. The Cleveland Museum of Art counts Hua Yan among the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, painters who turned away from orthodox ideas.
Album leaf; ink and light color on paper · Album, closed: 15.4 x 18.5 x 3.1 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art · Chinese painting: Qing
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Album of Landscape Paintings Illustrating Old Poems: Man with a Staff Admires Chrysanthemums at a Fence
- Artist
- Hua Yan (Chinese, 1682–c. 1765)
- Date
- 1745
- Medium
- Album leaf; ink and light color on paper
- Dimensions
- Album, closed: 15.4 x 18.5 x 3.1 cm (6 1/16 x 7 5/16 x 1 1/4 in.); Each painting: 11.2 x 13.1 cm (4 7/16 x 5 3/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Edwin R. and Harriet Pelton Perkins Memorial Fund
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.







