Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Plum blossoms
Lu Fu Chinese
Not on view
This ambitious handscroll is the surviving masterpiece of Lu Fu, a specialist in plum-blossom painting who lived and worked in Suzhou during the early sixteenth century. Delicate flowers cascade across a surface more than twenty feet in length, offering an up-close view of a horizontal slice of a plum tree in full bloom. With great precision, the artist reserved unpainted paper for the blossoms against a background of icy blue. The scroll is also a remarkably complete artifact of friendship among elite Suzhou society. Commissioned by a man named Zhang Ling to commemorate an afternoon spent with the famed scholar Shen Zhou (1427–1509), the scroll is inscribed by several of the most celebrated men of sixteenth-century Suzhou, including Shen, Tang Yin (1470–1524), and Wen Zhengming (1470–1559).
