American Museums Acquire Important Chinese Prints
The Cleveland Museum of Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on 7 August 2025 that they have jointly acquired 220 exceptional 18th-century Chinese colour prints from Suzhou. Each institution receives more than 100 prints, complementing their strong holdings of Chinese paintings and expanding scholarship on Chinese printmaking.
The Suzhou prints, named for the city in which they were largely produced, were assembled over more than 30 years by Christer von der Burg, Chairman of the Muban Educational Trust in London.
These prints depict a diverse range of subjects, including birds and flowers, antiquities, architectural schemes, gardens, historic sites, and elite women. Closely associated with and often imitating paintings, the prints have narrative and architectural details that bring fresh insights, new attention, and a fuller understanding of the two institutions’ collections of Chinese painting.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Suzhou prints is their extensive use of European visual conventions, especially linear perspective and hatching to indicate light and volume. Some of the prints are spectacular for their large size of c. 100x50 cm and for having been published in the brief period between c. 1720 to 1760. Due to the usage and historical circumstances, the prints are all but absent from collections in China.
There is forthcoming two-volume descriptive catalogue of the these prints, authored by Christer von der Burg and Weng Lianxi, to be published by Wenwu Chubanshe 文物出版社 in China, in both Chinese and English.
Christer von der Burg has spent many years collecting Suzhou prints. He holds the most comprehensive collection of Suzhou prints in private hands, containing prime examples in all major categories, most are of great rarity. In addition to these 220 prints acquired by CMA and MET, he is now working on cataloguing further 180 prints in his collection.
Left: Bird on Pomegranate, first half of the 1700s. China, Suzhou, Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper; 30 x 37.4 cm (11 13/16 x 14 3/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, J.H. Wade Trust Fund, 2025.108
Right: Women teaching children the four accomplishments (set of four prints) Woodblock print; printed in three shades of ink and hand-colored; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Qianlong period (1736–95). Each image: approximately 43 1/2 × 23 3/4 in. (110.2 × 60.3 cm); Douglas Dillon Fund, 2025 (2025.379, .380, .381, .382), The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Please see link for CMA and MET’s press release.