Lotus Leaves and Water Reeds
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Ink |
| Current Location: | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| Location History: | Lotus Leaves and Water Reeds was painted in China during the Qing dynasty, around the middle of the eighteenth century, by Bian Shoumin, and it carries the artist's own seal reading "Shoumin." In the nineteenth century it belonged to a collector named Dai Zhi, whose seal also appears on the leaf. It later entered the collection of John M. Crawford Jr., who bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1988, and the museum registered it in 1989 under the accession number 1989.363.164. Today it is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it is currently not on view. |
This painting is called Lotus Leaves and Water Reeds, and it is about staying pure and honest in a world that is not always clean. It was made by Bian Shoumin, a Chinese painter from the Qing dynasty, around 1740. It is an album leaf, which means it was one page in a small book of paintings, and it is done in black ink on paper. The leaf is about 22 by 47 centimeters, so it is meant to be held and looked at up close. Bian Shoumin was best known for painting wild geese and reeds, and people at that time even called his birds "Bian geese." He liked the water's edge so much that he gave himself the nickname "Old Man among the Reeds," and he signed this leaf with it. Here he used only ink, so the leaves and reeds get their shape from the brush and from darker and lighter tones. On the leaf there are fourteen lines of writing. They come from a famous old essay about loving the lotus, which says the flower grows out of the mud but stays clean, stands straight, and its smell travels far. By writing these words next to the painting, he shows that the lotus stands for a good person who keeps their values in a difficult place. A later collector named Dai Zhi added his seal in the 1800s, and in 1988 the painting was left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It reminds us that real beauty comes from a good heart.