Li Shida

Li Shida (李士達) was a Chinese painter born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, with sources placing his birth around 1549 to 1550; an exact date has not been documented. In 1574, during the reign of the Wanli Emperor, he obtained the jinshi degree, the highest level of the imperial civil service examinations, which placed him among the Ming scholar-official class. He was active as a painter from roughly 1580 to 1620, working in genre and landscape modes that depicted rural and festival life.

Dated works confirm his activity across at least two decades: New Year's Day in a Village at Stone Lake, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is dated 1609, and Returning Home in Wind and Snow, recorded by the dealer Kaikodo, is dated 1612. Museum catalogue entries place his death around 1620 to 1621. No source located gives a precise death date or a documented place of death, though his known biography centers on Suzhou.

Modern scholarship on Li Shida is limited, and no dedicated retrospective or substantial critical literature has been identified. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the dealer Kaikodo have each published catalogue descriptions of individual works, but no named critic's exact published statement about him in a major outlet has been located.

No verified public auction sale for a work by Li Shida has been identified in the sources available as of this writing. Paintings of this age, rarity, and museum-tracked provenance from the late Ming period typically move through specialist Asian art dealers and museum-adjacent channels rather than through the auction circuit tracked by mainstream contemporary price indices, which likely explains the absence of an established public sale record rather than indicating any market judgment on the work itself.

No catalogue raisonne exists for Li Shida, and authentication of his work depends on curatorial connoisseurship and comparison with the small number of signed, dated works held by institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. His exact birth and death dates are not firmly established: sources give a birth year anywhere from 1540 to 1550 and a death year of either 1620 or 1621, so any provenance research should treat these dates as approximate. No contemporary gallery or estate currently represents his work, and no confirmed public auction record exists, so collectors should expect works to surface, if at all, through specialist Asian art dealers rather than through regular saleroom activity.