Historical / contextual reference

One source-selected album leaf showing a small boat and figure; not complete preservation of the album or its page order.

Credit: Shitao (Zhu Ruoji) / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Family, Gift of Wen and Constance Fong, in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Dillon, 1976
Rights: Public domain; Met Open Access

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Shitao’s Returning Home is an album in which landscapes, flowers, poetry, and seals participate in a sequence of encounters. Some pages open outward into terrain; others bring attention close to a plant or a few brushstrokes. Writing does not simply explain pictures from outside them: its rhythm and placement belong to the visual experience. The Metropolitan Museum connects the work with Shitao’s return to Yangzhou after years of movement, including a stay in Beijing. An archive should preserve the album’s order and page relationships rather than extracting only the most dramatic landscape. Its intimate format shows how looking could alternate between reading, remembering, observing nature, and appreciating the physical movement of a brush.

Why preserve it: Curatorial interpretation: Sequence and page relationships are cultural information; an album can be damaged conceptually even when each isolated image survives.

Keep in mind: Cataloguing may count paired pages and leaves differently; preserve the complete album rather than multiplying its pages into separate selections. The title does not make every scene an autobiographical report.