Album leaf

Qian Hui'an

c. 1875

Ink and color on paper

Minneapolis Institute of Art

A man wearing a straw hat and carrying a basket walks with a child beside a flowering tree and a rocky incline. The focus of the painting is the man with a young boy standing next to a peach tree, apparently on a fishing expedition, since the man holds a fishing basket behind him and the boy carries a fishing rod. The elements typically seen in paintings of the traditional Peach Blossom Spring theme—peach trees in bloom, a fisherman—are all present in Qian Hui’an’s painting, but he has recombined them to suggest a quite different and more down-to-earth narrative of leisure, in which a man takes his son fishing. Formally, the composition has a typically late nineteenth-century flatness which comes, in part, from the fact that the composition i