Dragon and Tiger
Medium
One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink on paper
Dimensions
painting: 157.3 × 339 cm · framed: 172.3 × 354 cm
Classification
Painting
Department
Japanese Art
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Accession Number
1959.136.1
Tags
About this artwork
In Chinese cosmology, dragons produce rain clouds. The dragon disappearing into and reemerging from clouds in this painting seems to generate rough waves in the water below, pulling it toward the sky. The shape of the foreground wave is indirectly sampled from a painting by 13th-century Chinese painter Yujian, a handscroll once owned by the Ashikaga military rulers of Japan. Sesson must have known the famous painting though copies, and made a copy of his own. Here, the wave reinforces the powerf...