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Your galleryAnchorage on a rainy night
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- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
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Follow the diagonals the Met points out, from the wedge of foreground and the row of ever taller trees up to Shen’s poem at the upper right, then to Wu Kuan’s reply above.
Shen Zhou’s inscription says that in spring 1477 he lodged on a boat east of the city with his friend Weide and, when all was quiet after the rain, made this picture and poem to catch the mood. The Met notes that he painted it within two months of his father’s death. Wu Kuan, a close friend, answered with a poem on the same rhymes above, saying the mooring lay in front of his own family’s farmhouse.
Hanging scroll; ink on paper · Image (painting): 31 1/2 × 13 1/4 in. (80 × 33.7 cm · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Chinese painting: Ming
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Anchorage on a rainy night
- Artist
- Shen Zhou (Chinese, 1427–1509)
- Date
- dated 1477
- Medium
- Hanging scroll; ink on paper
- Dimensions
- Image (painting): 31 1/2 × 13 1/4 in. (80 × 33.7 cm) Overall with mounting: 84 × 19 3/4 in. (213.4 × 50.2 cm) Overall with knobs: 84 × 22 5/8 in. (213.4 × 57.5 cm) Image (colophon sheet): 12 × 13 1/4 in. (30.5 × 33.7 cm)
- Credit line
- Gift of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill, 2015
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artist’s life 1427–1509
View in the AtlasGaller’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.