Operating on Guan Yu's Arm (1840s): Art, History and Details

Operating on Guan Yu's Arm (1840s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Katsushika Ōi (Japanese, c. 1800-after 1857).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Ukiyo-e artists’ subject matter extended to popular literature. Katsushika Ōi used color to great effect in her gruesome version of an episode from a 14th-century Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Ōi portrayed the passage in which legendary 3rd-century military leader Guan Yu undergoes a bone scraping to remove poisons received from an arrow wound. In this sensationalist portrayal, Guan Yu’s attendants cower at the sight of his bloody arm while he remains unflinchingly focused on his game. As a woman, Ōi was an outlier in her era, but her talent was allowed to shine due to collaboration with her father, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), the famed designer of the print known as The Great Wave.

Object facts

• Title: Operating on Guan Yu's Arm
• Date: 1840s
• Creator attribution: Katsushika Ōi (Japanese, c. 1800-after 1857)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk
• Dimensions: Mounted: 206.7 x 73.1 cm (81 3/8 x 28 3/4 in.); Painting: 140.2 x 68.3 cm (55 3/16 x 26 7/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1998.178

A detail from the museum

This is the largest surviving painting by the artist.

Collection credit

Kelvin Smith Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Mainichi Shinbunsha 每日新聞社. Nikuhitsu ukiyoe meisakuten mokuroku [Catalogue of an exhibition of masterpieces of ukiyo-e painting]. Tōkyō: Isetan, 1957.
• Nikuhitsu ukiyo-e meisaku ten: Orinpikku Tokyo taikai kinen [The exhibition of ukiyoe hand-paintings [sic]: In commemoration of the Tokyo Olympics].Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1964.
• Shibui, Kiyoshi 渋井清, and Sadao Kikuchi 菊池貞夫. Nikuhitsu ukiyoe bijinga shūsei [肉筆浮世絵, 美人画集成 = Ukiyo-e paintings of beauties in Japanese collections]. Tōkyō: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1983.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.