Those Mosts of Our Collections

Chinese painting and calligraphy can be mounted in several formats, among them the handscroll, the album, and the hanging scroll. A handscroll is wider than it is tall and is usually viewed from the right end, so its composition unfolds from right to left; the traditional way was to unroll it with the left hand while rolling it up with the right, a section at a time, rather than laying it all out at once. A frontispiece sits on the right before the painting, and the section after it is left for inscriptions, the colophons. A hanging scroll hangs vertically on a wall and is seen whole; it is not meant to stay up for good, and traditionally it is shown for a while, then rolled up and stored, changed with the season or the occasion. An album gathers small paintings into a single volume. Of the seventeen paintings in the National Palace Museum's A Keen Eye, nine are handscrolls, six hanging scrolls, and two album leaves: the longest, Pu Ru's Evening Glow over a River Village, measures 1,192.5 cm wide and 49 cm high, and the tallest, Zhang Daqian's Wide River, Distant Mountains, is a hanging scroll 194.3 cm high.

Check whether the label says handscroll, hanging scroll, or album: walk a handscroll from right to left a section at a time; with a hanging scroll, step back to see it whole, then come close for the details.