Cinnabar Lotus

Artist Chang Dai-chien Zhang Daqian; Chinese, 1899 - 1983

Date1974

MaterialsInk and colors on paper

DimensionsH. 29 in x W. 21 in, H. 73.7 cm x W. 53.3 cm (image)

Credit LineBequest of Marjorie Walter Bissinger

Object number2010.174

DepartmentChinese Art

ClassificationsPrints And Drawings

On View

Not on view

Signed“大千唯印大幸”（朱文方印）、“環蓽盦”（朱文長方）、“大千三千”（朱文方印）。 Daqian wei yin daxin (square relief), Huanbi’an (rectangle relief), Daqian sanqian (square relief).

Inscribed“爰翁甲寅九月寫。‘〈洛陽伽藍記〉云：綠蘋浮池，朱荷出水。不言紅蓮，而曰朱荷者，所以別於尋常也。’同月十二日又記。” Painted by the old man Yuan in the ninth lunar month of the jiayin year (1974). ‘A Record of Buddhist Monasteries in Luoyang says: green duckweeds floating on the pond, and cinnabar lotus leaping out of water. Because its flowers differ from the ordinary, it is not called red lotus but cinnabar lotus.’ (I) inscribed again on the twelfth day of the same month.

Text Entries

Object Label

In 1973 and again in 1974, following the success of his Asian Art Museum retrospective, Chang Dai-chien was invited to create two portfolios of original lithographs by Editions Press in San Francisco. The first suite of Chang’s lithographs sold out quickly. It featured three dramatic landscapes in the artist’s splashed-ink and splashedcolor styles, which had already achieved critical attention locally, as well as a dramatically exuberant white lotus and spare persimmon branch. The second suite of six, with a colophon authored by art historian Michael Sullivan (1916– 2013), featured a beautiful orange shrike on a branch of orange leaves as well as images of a stone gate, a cinnabar lotus, a mountain monastery by a waterfall, a gibbon, and two peonies. Ms. Bissinger still owns two of the six works in the second set, and promises to donate the two to join in the four here to make a complete set.

Subject