The Football Players, a Song Dynasty Scroll

Cuju on silk, from the dynasty in which the Chinese game flourished.

Work: hanging scroll, ink and light colour on silk
Maker: Attributed to Ma Yuan
Date: late 1100s to early 1200s
Era: The Victorian game · 1870–1900
Source: Cleveland Museum of Art · via its open access collection

Six centuries before the Football Association, a scroll of footballers.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

A hanging scroll in ink and light colour on silk, 115.6 by 55.3 centimetres, attributed to Ma Yuan and dated by the Cleveland Museum of Art to the late 1100s or the first quarter of the 1200s, in the Southern Song dynasty. Its title is The Football Players. The game is cuju, which FIFA cites as one of the earliest forms of football for which documentary evidence survives, and which flourished in the Song. Players kicked a ball without using their hands and kept it from touching the ground. The museum has released the scroll under CC0, so the house can make this plate from its own photograph. It is the oldest picture in the collection by nearly five centuries.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

The Football Players, a Song Dynasty Scroll, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

The Football Players, a Song Dynasty Scroll framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of hanging scroll, ink and light colour on silk — Attributed to Ma Yuan, late 1100s to early 1200s — from the copy held by Cleveland Museum of Art · via its open access collection. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same collection