Daoist immortals in a landscape

Unidentified artist

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This painting invites the viewer to follow a mountain path across a stone arch and into a magical realm where herb gatherers dressed in garments of leaves and grass mingle with robed gentlemen engaged in scholarly pleasures: viewing paintings, playing weiqi (go, in Japanese), strumming a zither, composing poetry, engaging in "pure conversation," and contemplating the scenery. The scroll ends with an imposing terrace for viewing the sky and a cave-an entrance to a Daoist grotto-heaven. Based on the two-character signature at the left edge of the scroll, the painting has been identified as the work of Shen Xiyuan, a late fourteenth-century practitioner of the Southern Song academic tradition of Ma Yuan (active ca. 1190–1225). But many of the figural and landscape details reflect the styles of such mid-sixteenth-century artists as Zhou Chen and Qiu Ying, suggesting that a more appropriate date for the scroll would be the later sixteenth or early seventeenth century.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art