The Three Laughers of Tiger Valley

Category

Library Item

Item no

18951

Title

The Three Laughers of Tiger Valley

Description

The Buddhist monk Huiyuan founded and lived in Donglinsi temple on Mount Lushan. He lived a reclusive life and had vowed never to venture into the Tiger Ravine. One days, two good friends, the priest Lu Xiujing and the Confucian poet Tao Yuanming came to visit him. Having enjoyed a day of intellectual and philosophical discussion, as dusk was approaching Huiyuan accompanied his guests along the mountain path and they remained engrossed in conversation until a tiger's roar startled them into awareness that they had crossed the stone bridge bordering the ravine; at which point they all burst into spontaneous laughter. The theme is known as the Three Laughers of Tiger Ravine.

Artist / maker

Kano, Eitoku Tatsunobu

Date

1845

Size

28.8 x 14.5 cm

Type

Ink and colour; Mixed media

Location

Art and Design Library

From an album of miniature hanging scrolls:

This is part of a triptych with the previous and following pages.

This album comprises 76 pages of miniature paintings (and some calligraphies), the majority by artists of the Kano lineage, who worked for the ruling military regime. Each work is signed and sealed in miniature, and has been given a full brocade mounting as if it were a hanging scroll.

Information provided by Dr Rosina Buckland (National Museum of Scotland).

This album was donated to Edinburgh City Libraries by Marie Ferguson Dyer in honour of her father Henry Dyer. Dyer was a Scottish engineer who became the first Principal of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo in 1872.

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