Anchorage on a rainy night
Anchorage on a Rainy Night illustrates how Ming scholar-artists intertwined poetry and painting to create a vehicle for intimate exchanges among a close-knit circle of friends. Radiating a mood of subdued introspection, the painting mirrors Shen's state of mind less than two months after his father's death, when he found solace in a friend's company. Shen drew on the pictorial vocabulary of the Yuan artist Huang Gongwang (1269–1354): softly contoured peaks, flat plateaus, and outcrops of round boulders accented by dark foliage dots and a few foreground trees. But Shen simplified Huang's complex brush idiom to a few brush conventions and a narrow range of ink tonalities, and he reduced Huang's richly articulated compositional structure to a geometric scheme of repeated diagonals in which the wedge-shaped foreground, receding stream, echelon of successively taller trees, and distant mountain slope all point toward the upper right, where he added a poetic inscription that places his visual tone-poem in context:
Sparse paulownia leaves bring drops of morning dew,
East of the ancient city in the rising sun's slanting rays,
Swallows fly low over the overflowing pond.
Thus I know that tonight the spring rain will be plentiful,
How fitting that fish should leap and ducks swim.
On the twentieth day of the last [lunar] month of spring in the dingyou year [May 2, 1477], I lodged on a boat to
the east of the city with Weide. After the rain, everything grew quiet. I did this picture and poem to capture the mood.
In response to Shen's poem, his close friend Wu Kuan added a poem following the same rhyme scheme along with the observation that the harbor Shen has described is none other than the one fronting a farmhouse owned by Wu's family.
Sparse paulownia leaves bring drops of morning dew,
East of the ancient city in the rising sun's slanting rays,
Swallows fly low over the overflowing pond.
Thus I know that tonight the spring rain will be plentiful,
How fitting that fish should leap and ducks swim.
On the twentieth day of the last [lunar] month of spring in the dingyou year [May 2, 1477], I lodged on a boat to
the east of the city with Weide. After the rain, everything grew quiet. I did this picture and poem to capture the mood.
In response to Shen's poem, his close friend Wu Kuan added a poem following the same rhyme scheme along with the observation that the harbor Shen has described is none other than the one fronting a farmhouse owned by Wu's family.
Artwork Details
- 明 沈周 夜雨泊舟圖 軸
- Title: Anchorage on a rainy night
- Artist: Shen Zhou (Chinese, 1427–1509)
- Period: Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
- Date: dated 1477
- Culture: China
- 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) - Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Gift of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill, 2015
- Object Number: 2017.327.1
- Curatorial Department: Asian Art
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Shen Zhou
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first edition printed in 1679
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