Currently not on view
Odes to Fallen Flowers (Luo hua shi 落花詩),
ca. 1505
Tang Yin belonged to a community of prominent scholar-artists that included Shen Zhou (1427–1509), whose work is on view nearby. A precocious and gifted youth, Tang Yin aspired to a government career; after being implicated in an examination scandal in 1499, however, he was barred from official service and became a professional painter and calligrapher in Suzhou. Using fluid running-script calligraphy, Tang Yin wrote Odes to Fallen Flowers in response to a set of poems of the same title written by Shen Zhou in 1504. Although meant to complement Shen’s poems, Tang’s odes are charged with personal meanings, in which the image of fallen flowers may be a metaphor for his own failed political career:
Shimmering leaves of the peach tree—no one is looking to take a ferry;
Cascading apricot blossoms—I am reminded of the time of the examinations.
Information
ca. 1505
Asia, China
- Wen C. Fong, Images of the mind: selections from the Edward L. Elliott family and John B. Elliott collections of Chinese calligraphy and painting at the Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1984)., cat. no. 6
- "Selected checklist of objects in the collection of African art," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 58, no. 1/2 (1999): p. 77–83., p. 78
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"The checklist of the John B. Elliott Bequest," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 61 (2002): p. 49-99.
, p. 75
