Portrait of the Mother of Hotto Kokushi (1680): Art, History and Details

Portrait of the Mother of Hotto Kokushi (1680) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This is an imaginary portrait of the mother of the Zen master Hottō Enmyō Kokushi (1203–1298), whose sculptural portrait (1970.67) can be seen in gallery 235B. That image was carved soon after the master's death. His mother's image, however, was completed several hundred years later, so the likeness is doubtful.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of the Mother of Hotto Kokushi
• Date: 1680
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: wood with polychromy and inlaid crystal and stone eyes
• Dimensions: Overall: 60.3 cm (23 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1970.68

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Kurata, Osamu 蔵田蔵. Kumano 熊野. Tōkyō: Kodansha, 1968.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1970.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 58, no. 2, 1971, pp. 22–71.
• Lee, Sherman E. “Varieties of Portraiture in Chinese and Japanese Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 64, no. 4, 1977, pp. 118–136.

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.