Calligraphy

Calligraphy, Silk Scroll, 42" x 72"

This scroll is a print of four seven-syllable quatrains in white cursive Chinese characters on red paper. The quatrains describe the four seasons.

The small characters on the left tell that the Southern Song Dynasty poet, Fang Chengda (1126-1193), carved them on a stele in a Buddhist temple. In 1235, a monk called Shengyi made a rubbing, which was preserved in the Japanese Imperial collection in Tokyo. From it, people made other facsimile reproductions, and this scroll is one of them.

This scroll was one of four donated to the Library in 1962 by Mrs. James A. Thomas. The other three, one depicting a lady, another a group setting, and the third an elderly man, also hang in the Thomas Room.