Like his father and grandfather before him, Liu Jie made paintings for the Ming dynasty imperial court. This painting possesses the combination of legibility, technical finesse, and immense scale that the emperors required, and it would have been at home in one of the palatial spaces of the Forbidden City in Beijing, where Liu worked. The abundance of fish, the blossoming narcissus, and the flourishing sheaf of grain all work in concert to create an image of harmony and abundance well-suited to the emperor’s vision of his realm.
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The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
