Li Bai contemplating a waterfall

Category

Library Item

Item no

18965

Title

Li Bai contemplating a waterfall

Artist / maker

Kano, Tansen

Date

1845

Size

28.8 x 14.5 cm

Type

Ink and colour; Mixed media

Location

Art and Design Library

From an album of miniature hanging scrolls:

Li Bai (701-762; Ri Haku in Japanese) is a highly acclaimed Chinese poet who contributed to the flowering of poetry during the Tang dynasty. More than one thousand attributed poems are extant. His poems treat of the pleasures of friendship, the profundity of nature, solitude, and the joys of drinking wine. His early poems were composed during a golden age of peace and prosperity, but after the chaos of war and famine occasioned by the rebellion of the general An Lushan, they take on new qualities. The subject of Li Bai contemplating a waterfall was an established one in East Asian painting.

This album comprises 76 pages of miniature paintings (and some calligraphies), the majority by artists of the Kano lineage, who worked for the ruling military regime. Each work is signed and sealed in miniature, and has been given a full brocade mounting as if it were a hanging scroll.

Information provided by Dr Rosina Buckland (National Museum of Scotland).

This album was donated to Edinburgh City Libraries by Marie Ferguson Dyer in honour of her father Henry Dyer. Dyer was a Scottish engineer who became the first Principal of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo in 1872.

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