The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Itō Jakuchū · Dōshoku sai-e · thirty hanging scrolls in ink and colour on silk, painted in Kyoto about 1757 to 1766 · given to the Rinzai Zen temple Shōkoku-ji with a Shaka triad of three scrolls by the same hand, for memorial rites for the painter’s parents, his brother and himself, the gift complete by about 1770 · presented by the temple to the Imperial Household in 1889, the triad remaining at the temple · Museum of the Imperial Collections, Sannomaru Shōzōkan, Tokyo · scored as the thirty scrolls as one work, the triad they were made to surround as context
Mode
A set of hanging scrolls made as a votive offering; bird and flower painting turned into a survey of living kinds, each scroll complete on its own silk
Mythos
The living world gathered as a congregation before the Buddha; the auspicious phoenix and the peacock of paradise; every being sharing the Buddha nature
Phase
Painted about 1757 to 1766 and given to Shōkoku-ji, complete by about 1770; in the Imperial collection since 1889; conserved about 1999 to 2005; reunited with the triad for showings in 2007, 2012 and 2016
Presentation
Thirty hanging scrolls in ink and colour on silk, with colour laid on the reverse of the silk; made to hang round a Shaka triad of three scrolls
Register
Wonder and intensity: grandeur in white, cold in snow, excess in crowds, the uncanny in the deep; delight in the yard
Scale
Thirty scrolls, the creatures of air, land, water and shore, one act of regard
Governing Proposition
A Kyoto greengrocer’s heir gave up the family shop, painted for about a decade, and gave thirty scrolls of living things to a Zen temple, to hang round an image of the Buddha at the rites for his family’s dead. No human figure appears in any of them. A white phoenix, a yard full of cocks, frogs and tadpoles in the mud of a pond, a beach of shells: each creature is given the same total attention, set down feather by feather and scale by scale until it is both a living thing and a pattern. The wager of the set is that the commonest creature, looked at long enough, is as splendid as the mythic one, and that all of them, painted so, can stand before the sacred on equal terms.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Itō Jakuchū was born in Kyoto in 1716 and died there in 1800. He was the eldest son of a greengrocer’s house in the Nishiki market, and in about 1755 he handed the business to his brother in order to paint. The man who did so was about forty. He belonged to no studio and served no patron, and the work he made over the following decade was a gift: thirty hanging scrolls of living things, painted in ink and colour on silk from about 1757 to 1766, given with a Shaka triad of his own, Śākyamuni with Monju and Fugen in three scrolls, to the Rinzai Zen temple Shōkoku-ji in Kyoto. The gift was complete by about 1770. It secured memorial rites for his parents, for his brother and for himself.
The title is Dōshoku sai-e, the Colorful Realm of Living Beings. At the temple the thirty were hung round the triad at an annual rite, thirty-three hangings together, the Buddha at the centre and the creatures about him. There is no human figure in any scroll. Birds dominate, and the chicken recurs most, for Jakuchū kept them and several scrolls are of cocks and hens. Others leave the air: two scrolls of fish, a pond with its frogs and insects, a beach of shells. Others give the seasons and the hours: ducks in snow, a plum under the moon, chrysanthemums by a stream, sparrows in autumn.
The work scored is the thirty scrolls as one work. The triad they were made to surround is context: it is the centre the set was painted for, and it is weighed wherever the set’s meaning depends on it, but it is not scored. Since 1889 the two have been apart, the thirty in the Imperial collection in Tokyo, the triad at the temple in Kyoto, and they are brought together only for showings. Hung on a gallery wall, the set reads as a sequence of thirty pictures; hung round the Buddha, it was a congregation. The page weighs both, and charges the set wherever it leans on the room it no longer stands in.
Movement II
The phoenix stands on an old pine, white against the dark of the tree and a red sun, its feathers patterned like lace, its tail falling the length of the silk. Its pair in the set is Old Pine and Peacock: the imagined bird and the real one, white against colour, both rising up the vertical of the scroll. They are the summits of the realm. The phoenix is the auspicious bird of the sage ruler, the peacock the bird of the Buddhist paradise, and the two carry the set’s myth into single images, as the configuration carries it whole.
Their light is made from behind. Jakuchū laid colour on the reverse of the silk, and the full conservation of about 1999 to 2005 documented how: the colour behind softens and fixes the colour in front, so that whites and plumage glow from within rather than lie on the surface. That is how the scrolls make ordinary creatures look radiant. It is a technique used here with a sophistication rare in its period, and it belongs to what the form knows, as the vertical field belongs to it: the phoenix and the peacock climb the pine, and the scroll gives each creature its own height and its own season.
What the set discloses begins here and goes past it. The phoenix is given all the attention a painter can give, and so are the cock in the yard, the frog, the sea shell and the sparrow. Offered on equal terms to the Buddha they surrounded, they show what Mahāyāna teaching says, that grasses, trees and all beings have the Buddha nature; the scrolls show it by image and do not state it. They show too that the ordinary bird, looked at long enough, becomes as strange as the mythic one, and that the line between the observed and the visionary lies in the attention, not in the creature. Both hold. The first depends on the triad and the rite, which the scrolls no longer stand among, and much of what they give alone is wonder, a state, which ranks below a meaning. They disclose no condition of human life beyond the devotion that made them.
Movement III
In Roosters a crowd of cocks is massed in one field: combs, wattles, eyes and hackles repeated until the birds become a wall of pattern that still breathes. The height here is excess. Each comb is laid in mineral colour, each feather stated, and the control keeps the crowd legible bird by bird. The meaning of the set, the equal glory of every creature, exists only in that degree of finish, and across thirty scrolls and about a decade the standard does not drop. The costs are real. Some compositions are airless, crowded to the edge; some figures, set against flat grounds, are stiff in pose, as though collected rather than alive; the grandest scrolls approach the over-statement of a showpiece.
The chickens are also the set’s weakness as a set. They form a strand of variations, and one or two of those scrolls could go without the whole losing a domain or an argument. The set is additive in kind, thirty offerings each complete on its own silk. Other scrolls resist subtraction: take away the pond, the shells or the fish and the realm loses the water and the shore; take away the snow and it loses winter; take away the plum and the moon and it loses night. A reading of the thirty-three hangings as the thirty-three forms of Kannon is offered and cannot be demonstrated from the set. What compels is inside each scroll, where the crowding is chosen and largely required.
The manner had sources. Chinese bird and flower painting of the Song and Ming was there to study in the temple collections of Kyoto; the newer Chinese realism came through Nagasaki with Shen Quan; the Kanō and Rinpa painters had made the decorative screen. Jakuchū pushed the naturalism of the creature past natural sight into pattern, so that minute observation and flat ornament became one surface, and he added a strangeness that no school taught: snow that drips like syrup, rocks like coral, crowds of identical birds. It was a personal manner more than a new grammar of painting. It was staked on a life, and the stake was given away.
Movement IV
In Insects at a Pond the realm goes down into the mud: frogs and tadpoles, dragonflies, a gourd vine and its insects. Shells is a beach of them. In the two fish scrolls the fish swim down the silk as though seen from above, and in one an octopus carries a smaller one on its arm. Mandarin Ducks in Snow gives cold: snow clotted and dripping on the branches, one duck seen under the water, the stillness of a winter pond. The fish and shells hold their species and their sheen; the snow is an invention of brush and pigment. With the peacock’s train and the moon behind the plum, these turn the set’s wonder toward the uncanny.
Set the white phoenix beside the tadpoles, the two most distant things in the thirty, and one law holds them. Every creature, sacred or common, is rendered with the same total attention, as a pattern that is also a living thing, against a ground that is itself pattern. The law runs across air, land, water and shore, through the seasons and the hours, from the auspicious to the comic, from a single bird to a beach of shells, and nothing in the set breaks it. Its range is in kinds of being. In another sense it is narrow: there is one mode of seeing for everything, one act of regard, and no human presence anywhere.
The orders the set holds are several, and the configuration binds them: the natural order across birds, fish, insects, shells, plants and weather; the course of the year; the sacred, in the set’s place round the Buddha; the family, in a gift for the rites of the painter’s parents, his brother and himself. The creatures are at once the congregation and the gift. What is absent is as plain. There is no human figure, no labour, no city, no state and no history, and no consciousness beyond the looking that the scrolls embody. The family and the sacred are held by the gift and the rite more than within the images, and the realm is a realm of everything that lives except the one who looks.
Movement V
Jakuchū was admired in Kyoto in his lifetime, but the set was in a temple and seen once a year, and the decisive turn in Kyoto painting of his time came from Maruyama Ōkyo’s naturalism, not from him. In 1889 Shōkoku-ji presented the thirty scrolls to the Imperial Household; the triad stayed at the temple. In the Imperial collection the set was seldom seen, and through the Meiji years and the early twentieth century it was half forgotten. It is now in the Museum of the Imperial Collections, Sannomaru Shōzōkan, in Tokyo. All thirty survive together, as Jakuchū made them; nothing that carries the work is lost or replaced. The silk has had the ordinary history of scrolls, remounting and, about 1999 to 2005, a full conservation, with no loss to the image.
The recovery came from the 1970s, when Jakuchū was read among the eccentrics of Edo painting, and the set has since become the centre of his reputation. Set and triad were shown together at Shōkoku-ji’s Jōtenkaku Museum in 2007, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2012, and in Tokyo in 2016, the tercentenary of his birth. The exhibitions from 2000 on made it among the most visited works of Japanese art, and it has reorganised the canon of Edo painting and is cited by Japanese artists of the present. That reach is late, and is weighed as late. The questions stay open: a Zen devotional programme or the joyous excess of a naturalist; realism or ornament; what the order and the number meant at the rite; vision or the mannerism of a solitary master. Much of what return yields is detail and technique more than meaning.
The desk sets the set level with Ogata Kōrin’s Irises at 8.3, the nearest work in kind, a decorative surface of one natural subject: the screens are tighter and more compelled, the scrolls wider and deeper. Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Pine Trees stands a tenth above at 8.4, the more necessary and more original single act, and the Tale of Genji Scrolls at 8.4, which hold the human world these creatures lack. Monet’s Water Lilies, the other painted cycle of nature without people, stands three tenths above at 8.6 for an art it reorganised. Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, another Japanese catalogue of the observed world and its seasons, stands at 8.1, and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a cycle of the natural year in pictorial means, at 8.0. On the old pine the white bird glows from behind the silk, and the frog in the mud has been looked at as long.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the set is judged as a set. Some of it resists. The phoenix and the peacock are its two summits, white against colour, the imagined bird against the real one; Insects at a Pond, Shells and the two fish scrolls carry the realm out of the air into water, mud and shore, and without them the gift would be a book of birds, not of living beings; the snow scrolls carry winter, the plum and moon carry night. Remove one of these and a domain of the world goes with it. But the set is additive in kind, thirty offerings each complete on its own silk, and the several chicken scrolls are a strand of variations, one or two of which could go. Within each scroll the crowding is chosen and largely compelled.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Two things can be stated, and they hold. Every living thing, the cock in the yard, the frog, the sea shell, the sparrow, is given the same total attention as the phoenix and offered on equal terms to the Buddha it surrounded: the Mahāyāna teaching that grasses, trees and all beings have the Buddha nature is disclosed by image, not stated. And the ordinary yard bird, looked at long enough, becomes as strange and splendid as a mythic one, so that the boundary between the observed and the visionary lies in attention, not in the creature. Held below the gate because the first depends on the triad and the rite, which are context, and because much of what the scrolls deliver alone is wonder, a state, which ranks below a meaning.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of more than one kind. The white phoenix on the old pine is grandeur in white, its feathers patterned like lace against a dark pine and a red sun. Mandarin Ducks in Snow brings cold: snow clotted and dripping on the branches, one duck seen under the water, the stillness of a winter pond. Roosters rises by excess, a wall of combs, eyes and feathers until the birds become a pattern that still breathes. The peacock’s train, the moon behind the plum and the octopus among the fish turn transport toward the uncanny. It recurs scroll by scroll. Held below the top because it is mostly beauty and astonishment, without terror or human stakes, and some of the chicken and small bird scrolls are delight rather than height.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Some is built. The set as hung is a cosmos round a Buddha: the living world in all its domains gathered as a congregation before Śākyamuni, so that the archetype of creation assembled before the sacred is the structure of the gift, not an allusion in it. The phoenix is the auspicious bird of the sage ruler, the peacock the bird of the Buddhist paradise. The rest stays wholly particular: these cocks, this pond, these shells, painted from life. Held below the gate because the building depends on the triad, which is context, and because on a gallery wall the scrolls read more as a bestiary of the natural world than as a myth; the particular rises to the archetypal by the intensity with which it is looked at, closer to evocation than to construction.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance: Chinese bird and flower painting of the Song and Ming, studied in the Kyoto temple collections; the newer Chinese realist manner that came through Nagasaki with Shen Quan; the decorative screens of the Kanō and Rinpa painters. The departure: a naturalism of the creature pushed past natural sight into pattern, every feather and scale stated and the ground made a field of design, so that minute observation and flat ornament become one surface; and a strangeness no school taught, snow that drips like syrup, rocks like coral, crowds of identical birds. The stake was high and particular: a man of about forty gave up the family trade and gave a decade’s work as a votive offering, outside any studio or patron. Held below the top because the swerve made a personal manner more than a new grammar of painting.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Substitute a different form and much goes. The hanging scroll in a set gives each creature its own vertical field and its own season, and the ensemble, hung round the triad, makes a congregation; an album or a handscroll would make a book to be turned, and the creatures would no longer surround the Buddha or the viewer. The silk and the back-painting are part of what the work knows: colour laid on the reverse softens and fixes the front, so that the whites and the plumage glow from within, which is how ordinary creatures are made to look radiant. The vertical governs the compositions: the phoenix and the peacock rise up the pine, the fish swim down the silk as though seen from above. Held below the top because in the form as now shown, a sequence on a gallery wall, the scrolls know nearly as much one by one as together.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: about two and a half centuries, with a reversal inside them. Admired in Kyoto in Jakuchū’s lifetime and half forgotten through the Meiji years and the early twentieth century, the set was recovered from the 1970s, when he was read as an eccentric, and has since become the centre of his reputation. The questions remain open: whether the set is a Zen devotional programme or the joyous excess of a naturalist; how far the patterning is realism and how far ornament; what the order and number of the scrolls meant at the rite; how much of the strangeness is vision and how much the mannerism of a solitary master. The conservation found new matter in the making itself, and the scrolls repay close looking without end in detail. Held a step below the top because much of the return is of detail and technique more than of meaning.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is Japanese painting of the middle and later eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is high and singular: the largest and most finished statement of a manner that joined Chinese realism, Japanese decoration and an obsessive eye, and that widened what bird and flower painting could be, an act of devotion in thirty parts and a survey of living kinds. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century it was narrow, since the set hung in a temple and was shown once a year, and the decisive redirection of Kyoto painting came from Maruyama Ōkyo’s naturalism, not from Jakuchū. The reach came late: from the 1970s and through the exhibitions from 2000 on, the set reorganised the canon of Edo painting and is now among the most visited works of Japanese art. Delayed reach is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two hundred and sixty years. Form: whole. All thirty survive, together, as Jakuchū made them; nothing that carries the work is lost or replaced. Presence: the charge falls here. In the temple the set was shown once a year at a rite; in the Imperial collection from 1889 it was seldom seen, and it passed a long period of half obscurity before its recovery. The parting of the set from the triad in 1889 is a loss of context, not of the work, and the two are reunited for showings. Fabric: the ordinary history of silk scrolls, remounting and a recent full conservation, with no loss to the image. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, at the lower end of its span and a tenth lower for presence. Fame since 2000 lifts nothing further.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of ink and colour on silk, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the work’s meaning, the equal glory of every creature, exists only in the degree of finish. Each feather of the phoenix is a pattern stated and still a feather; the cocks’ combs, wattles and hackles are laid in mineral colour with a control that keeps a crowd legible; the fish and shells hold their species and their sheen; the snow is a new invention of brush and pigment. The back-painting is used with a sophistication rare in its period, and across thirty scrolls and a decade the standard does not drop. The costs: some compositions are airless, crowded to the edge; some figures against flat grounds are stiff, as though collected rather than alive; the grandest scrolls approach the over-statement of a showpiece.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the white phoenix, imagined and ceremonial, on its pine, and the frogs and tadpoles in the mud of Insects at a Pond. One law holds them. Every creature, sacred or common, is rendered with the same total attention, as a pattern that is also a living thing, set against a ground that is itself pattern. The law runs across air, land, water and shore, across the seasons, from the auspicious to the comic, from a single bird to a beach of shells, and nothing in the set breaks it. The range is wide in kinds of being and in register. It is narrow in another sense: there is one mode of seeing for everything and no human presence, and the law governs a single act of regard. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range of creatures is large.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, wide, across birds, fish, insects, shells, plants and weather; the seasons and the course of the year; the sacred, in the set’s place round the Buddha and the teaching that every being shares his nature; and the family, in a gift made for the memorial rites of the painter’s parents, his brother and himself. The configuration integrates them, for the creatures are both the congregation and the gift. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no human figure in any scroll, no labour, no city, no state, no history, and no consciousness beyond the act of looking that the scrolls embody. The family and the sacred are held by the gift and the rite more than within the images. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Made at 9.1, then The Inner Law at 8.7, The Sublime at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6. All thirty scrolls survive together as they were painted; a decade of finish without lapse, back-painting used for meaning, every feather a pattern and still a feather; one law of equal attention held from the phoenix to the tadpole; elevation renewed scroll by scroll; and a naturalism pushed into pattern by a man who gave up his trade to make it and gave it away.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: the natural order, the year, the sacred and the family are held, and there is no human figure, no labour, no city, no state, no history. Below the rest of the twelve, The Inevitable at 7.9: the set is additive, and the strand of chicken scrolls could lose a member. Then The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition, each at 8.0: the disclosure leans on a triad and a rite the scrolls no longer stand among, and the reach came two centuries late. One fact lies under all four: the set is a single act of regard, complete in each scroll, whose larger meaning was given by the room it was made for.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 falls short by four tenths, and The Unconcealment at 8.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 by five each, the disclosure and the myth both leaning on a triad that is context, and the reach coming late. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 7.9, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 100.1, an average of 8.34 that displays 8.3, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, seven tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the set, from reproductions and from the published conservation and exhibition record; the set is known well as a set, and the most discussed scrolls in particular, but not every one of the thirty titles is held with confidence, and only the scrolls that can be named with confidence are named. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the thirty hanging scrolls, Dōshoku sai-e, by Itō Jakuchū, ink and colour on silk, painted about 1757 to 1766, as one work. The Shaka triad of three scrolls by Jakuchū, which the thirty were made to surround and which has remained at Shōkoku-ji since the thirty passed to the Imperial Household in 1889, is context and is not scored; it is weighed only where the set’s meaning depends on it. Remounting and the conservation of about 1999 to 2005 bear on the set’s survival only. The reading of the thirty-three hangings as the thirty-three forms of Kannon is offered and not demonstrable, and is given so. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the scrolls, the dates and the stages of the gift and the letter that accompanied it, the name of the annual rite, the terms on which the set passed to the Imperial Household, its designation, the length of the conservation, the share of chicken scrolls and the number of shells, the pigments of particular scrolls and what lies behind the silk of the phoenix, the state of the colours, Jakuchū’s copying of Chinese paintings, his rank among the painters of Kyoto in his lifetime, the attendance at the showing of 2016, and the names of present-day painters who work in his manner.