The Sand-Carrying Festival (Sunamochi Matsuri) (1856): Art, History and Details

The Sand-Carrying Festival (Sunamochi Matsuri) (1856) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sakai Basai (Japanese, dates unknown).

The work and its context

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

Dredging waterways to preserve their function once required the cooperation of large numbers of people, seen at the top of this painting. Sand-carrying festivals were historically associated with religious rites or gathering alms to construct places of worship, and involved not only the labor of collecting sand from rivers but also parades and performances marking the event. Kyoto’s Kamo River has been dredged many times over the centuries, including in 1856, the year this image was made. Although the title at the upper right says Taihei Kakan, or “Peaceful, Beautiful View,” the painter’s delightful scene reminds his audience that at the best of times, peace may have little to do with quiet. Sakai Baisai was a student of literati painter Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783–1856). He was active until around 1879, when he relocated to Kobe to make his living as a design painter on porcelains destined for export.

Object facts

• Title: The Sand-Carrying Festival (Sunamochi Matsuri)
• Date: 1856
• Creator attribution: Sakai Basai (Japanese, dates unknown)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting only: 128.6 x 56.5 cm (50 5/8 x 22 1/4 in.); Including mounting: 193.7 x 77.5 cm (76 1/4 x 30 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1991.44

Collection credit

Kelvin Smith Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "Selected 1991 Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 2 (1992): 63-83.
• Grossman, Nancy, James T. Ulak, Marjorie Williams, and Laurence Channing. Art of Japan: Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2005.

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.