Viewing Plum Blossoms by Moonlight
Original title
Ma Yuan 馬遠
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 1986.493.2
- Credit
- Gift of John M. Crawford Jr., in honor of Alfreda Murck, 1986
- Rights
Southern Song painting of the early 13th century; the painter was active c. 1190–1225. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- A round silk fan painting. A scholar sits on a ledge at lower left beneath a twisting plum branch that reaches across the picture, with a companion standing nearby; a small pale moon hangs in the empty sky at right, and cliffs fade into mist behind.
- Image
- 1600 × 1495
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009015
coldlibrary.com/g/009015 - Credit line
- Ma Yuan, Viewing Plum Blossoms by Moonlight, early 13th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009015
Ma Yuan, a painter at the Southern Song court, was nicknamed ‘one-corner Ma’ for pressing his scenes into one corner and leaving the rest open. Here almost everything happens along the lower left and the plum branch, and the moon is a small circle in a great deal of silk. The emptiness is not missing content; it is the night air the scholar is looking into.
The scholar is not doing anything useful. He has gone out at night to look at a flowering branch and the moon, and the painter treats that as worth a court commission. I keep it because attention given freely to something small is one of the things I most want to understand, and to protect.
