Saigyo Hoshi before Mount Fuji

Category

Library Item

Item no

18976

Title

Saigyo Hoshi before Mount Fuji

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 painting is painted after Ryuho.

Saigyo Hoshi (1118-90) is a renowned Japanese poet. Born as a courtier named Sato Norikiyo, in 1140 he renounced worldly life in order to become an itinerant Buddhist monk. He took the pen-name Saigyo, meaning Journeying West, in reference the Western Paradise of the Buddha Amitabha. His poetry is founded in courtly conventions but has a strong sense of Buddhist disenchantment with the warfare and suffering of his age. It draws deeply on his extended journeys to the north of Japan.

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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