Peafowl and Phoenixes (late 1500s): Art, History and Details

Peafowl and Phoenixes (late 1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Tosa Mitsuyoshi (Japanese, 1539–1613).

The work and its context

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

Phoenixes are fantastical birds said to inhabit paulownia trees and eat bamboo, and to celebrate virtuous rulers. Peafowl are birds that amuse themselves in the lake of the Buddha Amida’s Pure Land, a paradise where many once hoped to find themselves after death. Both birds appeared on Japanese textiles or paintings in the 1500s and 1600s, used in official ceremonies centered around emperors.

Object facts

• Title: Peafowl and Phoenixes
• Date: late 1500s
• Creator attribution: Tosa Mitsuyoshi (Japanese, 1539–1613)
• Culture: Japan, Momoyama period (1573–1615)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Pair of six-panel screens; ink, color, and gold on gilded paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 173.1 x 374.4 cm (68 1/8 x 147 3/8 in.); Overall: 175.9 x 377.2 cm (69 1/4 x 148 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1986.2

A detail from the museum

Members of the Tosa studio of painters once served as heads of the imperial painting bureau.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1986.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 2 (February 1987): 38–79.
• Cunningham, Michael R. The Triumph of Japanese Style: 16th-Century Art in Japan. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with the Indiana University Press, 1991.
• Cunningham, Michael R. Masterworks of Asian art. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.

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.