New York, NY and Cleveland, OH (August 7, 2025) —The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art announced today that they have jointly acquired a large group of exceptional 18th-century Chinese color prints from Suzhou. Each institution receives more than 100 prints, complementing their strong holdings of Chinese paintings and expanding scholarship on Chinese printmaking.
The Suzhou prints, named for the city in which they were largely produced, were assembled by Christer von der Burg, who holds the most comprehensive collection of Suzhou prints in private hands. The acquisition of these prints places the CMA and The Met among the top destinations for the study of Suzhou prints in the world.
“We are excited to collaborate with the Cleveland Museum of Art to acquire this extraordinary set of Suzhou prints,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “These vibrant works—which blend imagery from China’s elite painting tradition and vernacular art with techniques derived from European engravings—highlight the ongoing dialogue between peoples and societies, offering a rare opportunity to deepen our understanding of the cosmopolitan nature of Chinese visual culture.”
“We are delighted to work with our colleagues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on this unique acquisition, which allows our two institutions the rare opportunity to bring these outstanding prints to an American audience in the context of our respective Chinese collections,” said William M. Griswold, Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
China is known for its invention of woodblock printing in the 700s and as a pioneer in color printing with separate blocks in the early 1600s—a technique that was developed well before it spread to Japan. Color printing in China reached its peak around the 1700s, with the finest examples created in Suzhou. Preserved as wall decorations in Europe or in Japanese collections, very few of these prints have survived in China.
Curators from The Met and the CMA worked collaboratively to divide the collection in an equitable fashion, ensuring that both museums would have adequate representation across type and style while also confirming that coherent sets of prints remained together.
“This acquisition is transformative for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection,” said Clarissa von Spee, the CMA’s James and Donna Reid Curator of Chinese Art, Interim Curator of Islamic Art, and Chair of Asian Art. “These prints allow the museum to address China’s invention of printing—centuries before the accomplishments of Johannes Gutenberg—and highlight the innovation of color printing with multiple blocks. They are a meaningful complement to our strong holdings in Chinese painting.”
Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang Curator of Chinese Paintings at The Met, said, “Suzhou prints epitomize the intercultural communication that enlivened the early modern world. These 18th-century artworks drew freely on visual traditions both local and imported, and they became popular not only in China but also in Japan and Europe in the 1700s. In this way, Suzhou prints provide some of the most vivid evidence we have of our interconnected past.”
The prints entering the collections of the CMA and The Met depict a diverse range of subjects, including birds and flowers, antiquities, architectural schemes, gardens, historic sites, and elite women. Closely associated with and often imitating paintings, the prints have narrative and architectural details that bring fresh insights, new attention, and a fuller understanding of the two institutions’ collections of Chinese painting.
Prints from this acquisition will go on view at the CMA in winter 2026 in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Galleries, allowing visitors to contextualize Chinese innovations in woodblock prints alongside other contemporaneous works on paper. At The Met, select works from the collection will go on view this fall as part of the exhibition Chinese Painting and Calligraphy: Selections from the Collection (November 22, 2025–May 31, 2026).
About the Collection
Nearly all the prints from the collection date to the 18th century, and many are large in scale (typical size is 40 x 20 inches). Many prints are polychrome, some as the result of multicolor woodblock printing processes pioneered in China, while others were hand colored at the time of creation after initial impressions in multiple tones of ink. Following the practice of Chinese painting, many of the prints have inscriptions in the form of poems and artist signatures. The Suzhou prints feature a range of subjects and genres, including architectural views, cityscapes, elite women, birds and flowers, New Year’s prints, games, and more; the collection contains prime examples in all major categories.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Suzhou prints is their extensive use of European visual conventions, especially linear perspective and hatching to indicate light and volume. While European pictures had been circulating in China for centuries, by the time Suzhou prints began to flourish in the 1730s and ’40s, their impact had been confined largely to the imperial court and to subtle adaptations in certain local painting traditions. With the rise of Suzhou prints, these conventions burst into the visual landscape of middle- and upper-middle-class homes, reflecting a Chinese visual culture that was more cosmopolitan and globally interconnected than has heretofore been appreciated. The many striking examples of European visual techniques in these prints will allow both museums to make this point with vivid examples drawn from the lives of everyday Chinese people of the 18th century.
Image Captions
Left: Woman teaching children to play the guqin zither, from four-print set “Women teaching children the four accomplishments"; Woodblock print; printed in three shades of ink and hand-colored; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Qianlong period (1736–95). Image: approximately 44 1/4 × 24 1/2 in. (112.4 × 62.2 cm); Douglas Dillon Fund, 2025 (2025.382), The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Right: Bird on Pomegranate, first half of the 1700s. China, Suzhou, Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper; 30 x 37.4 cm (11 13/16 x 14 3/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, J.H. Wade Trust Fund, 2025.108
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About The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day—who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met displays tens of thousands of objects covering 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions, events and educational programs, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures. The Met presents over 29,000 educational events and programs throughout the year to make art accessible to everyone, regardless of background, disability, age, or experience.
About the Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes more than 63,000 artworks and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. The museum is a significant international forum for exhibitions, scholarship, and performing arts and is a leader in digital innovations. One of the top comprehensive art museums in the nation, recognized for its award-winning open-access program and free of charge to all, the Cleveland Museum of Art is located in the University Circle neighborhood.
The museum is supported in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and made possible in part by the Ohio Arts Council (OAC), which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts. The OAC is a state agency that funds and supports quality arts experiences to strengthen Ohio communities culturally, educationally, and economically. For more information about the museum and its holdings, programs, and events, call 888-CMA-0033 or visit cma.org.