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Follow the fold lines fanning across the gold-flecked paper, find the masts of the boats moored by the shore, then look at Wen’s poem at the far right.
After a spring boat trip on Lake Tai with a friend in 1543, Wen Zhengming painted this view of China’s “Great Lake” for him. He brushed it on a folding fan of gold-flecked paper, later flattened and mounted as an album leaf, and wrote his poem at the far right, wondering who could hold the lake’s vastness in his heart. Poems by Xu Jin and Zhang Huan follow it.
Folding fan mounted as an album leaf; ink and color on gold-flecked paper · 9 3/4 x 20 3/4 in. (24.8 x 52.7 cm · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Chinese painting: Ming
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Details and source
- Museum title
- View of Lake Tai
- Artist
- Wen Zhengming (Chinese, 1470–1559)
- Date
- dated 1543
- Medium
- Folding fan mounted as an album leaf; ink and color on gold-flecked paper
- Dimensions
- 9 3/4 x 20 3/4 in. (24.8 x 52.7 cm)
- Credit line
- Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1982
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artist’s life 1470–1559
View in the AtlasGaller’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.