Portrait of Ōzora Buzaemon (1827): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Ōzora Buzaemon (1827) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Watanabe Kazan (Japanese, 1793–1841).

The work and its context

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

Over seven feet tall, Ōzora Buzaemon became a tabloid sensation when he arrived in Edo (Tokyo) in 1827 . His handprints were cherished souvenirs, and his image was sold on woodblock prints. As inscriptions on the scroll detail, Watanabe Kazan met Buzaemon at the residence of a noted Confucian scholar. Using a camera obscura–type device—a tool that uses light to project an image onto a surface—he made this preliminary drawing for a painting. The portrayal depicts Buzaemon’s discomfort in being stared at.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Ōzora Buzaemon
• Date: 1827
• Creator attribution: Watanabe Kazan (Japanese, 1793–1841)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 221.8 x 117.8 cm (87 5/16 x 46 3/8 in.); Overall: 256.8 x 131 cm (101 1/8 x 51 9/16 in.); with knobs: 256.8 x 140.5 cm (101 1/8 x 55 5/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1980.177

A detail from the museum

Watanabe Kazan was interested in Rangaku (Dutch Learning).

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1980.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163–219.
• Neils, Jenifer. “The Twain Shall Meet.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 72, no. 6, 1985, pp. 326–359.
• Cunningham, Michael R., Stanislaw J. Czuma, Anne E. Wardwell, and J. Keith Wilson. Masterworks of Asian Art. Cleveland, OH: The 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.