Zhao Yunhe

Zhao Yunhe was born in 1874, a date given consistently by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MutualArt, Artsy, and Sotheby's; no source consulted for this profile records an exact birth date. A single source, AskART, identifies him as a native of Suzhou and records the courtesy names Zhao Qi and Zhao Ziyun, though this has not been independently corroborated elsewhere and should be treated with some caution. He worked in traditional Chinese ink and color painting, producing landscapes and botanical subjects in formats that included folding fans and album leaves. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a work titled Landscape, a folding fan mounted as an album leaf in ink and color on alum paper and dated 1953, indicating he remained active into his late seventies. He died in 1955; no source consulted gives an exact death date or place.

No exhibition history, awards, or named critical commentary for Zhao Yunhe could be identified in the sources consulted for this profile. His standing rests primarily on his inclusion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection and on the continued, limited circulation of his paintings through auction houses that specialize in traditional Chinese painting. This pattern, institutional presence without a developed English-language critical literature, is common for painters of his generation whose reputations were built within Chinese connoisseurship circles rather than through Western exhibition history.

Zhao Yunhe's work circulates almost entirely in the secondary market for traditional Chinese painting, with auction-tracking databases reporting several hundred lots attributed to him over time. The best-documented single sale identified in current research is Fruit on Branches, sold at Christie's for GBP 3,250; the exact sale date and location are not confirmed in sources consulted. Separately, aggregate summaries from at least one auction database reference realized prices reaching into the tens of thousands of dollars for individual works attributed to him, but the specific lot, date, and house behind those higher figures could not be independently confirmed, so they are not presented here as a verified auction record. A separate market listing for an artist recorded as "ZHAO Yunhe" gives conflicting life dates of 1829 to 1884; this appears to be either a distinct entry or a cataloguing discrepancy and should not be treated as this painter's market data.

Records for Zhao Yunhe are inconsistent across databases, and a name-order variant, Yunhe Zhao, is used interchangeably with Zhao Yunhe in Western-order catalogues; buyers should confirm which convention a given database uses before comparing sale histories. There is no catalogue raisonne, so attribution and provenance should be checked directly against museum and auction house cataloguing rather than assumed. Aggregate price data for this artist includes figures that could not be traced to a specific, verifiable lot, so any claim of a definitive auction record should be treated with caution absent a confirmed sale record, and collectors should expect a thin, unevenly documented market rather than a continuous price history.