Ink Landscape (right) and Zhuangzi (left)

Category

Library Item

Item no

19005

Title

Ink landscape (right) and Zhuangzi, after Shokado (left)

Description

Zhuangzi was a Chinese philosopher during the Warring States Period (403-222 BC) who was concerned with the nature of human consciousness. He related a dream wherein he had been a butterfly, but on waking he was unsure if he was not now a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi.

Artist / maker

Kano, Tosen Nakanobu

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:

Ink landscape is a painting by Kano Tosen Nakanobu and Zhuangzi is a painting by Sumiyoshi Hirosada.

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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Ink landscape (right) and Zhuangzi (left)