Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals of the Buddhist Clergy (late 1300s–1400s): Art, History and Details

Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals of the Buddhist Clergy (late 1300s–1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Handscrolls depicting eminent poets and their poems is a classic Japanese painting genre. This fragment is the end of a scroll, the beginning of which survives in the Tokyo National Museum. It has a preface stating it is based on a selection of 36 monks paired with their waka (31-syllable poems) made by Eikai (1278–1347) from Kashūji temple in the year of his death. These two portraits are of Jōkei (1155–1212) and Myōe (1173–1232), to the right and left, respectively.

Object facts

• Title: Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals of the Buddhist Clergy
• Date: late 1300s–1400s
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Fragment of a handscroll remounted as a hanging scroll; ink and slight color on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 29.1 x 44.5 cm (11 7/16 x 17 1/2 in.); Mounted: 113.2 x 56.6 cm (44 9/16 x 22 5/16 in.); with knobs: 113.2 x 61.2 cm (44 9/16 x 24 1/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.88

A detail from the museum

The monk Myōe kept a diary of his dreams that survives in fragments today.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• Tōyō kaiga no seika: tokubetsuten: Kurīvurando Bijutsukan no korekushon kara [東洋絵画の精華: 特别展: クリーヴラント美術館のコレクションから= Highlights of Asian painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art]. Nara, Japan: Nara National Museum, 1998.
• Myōe. Tokubetsuten, Kokuhō Chōjū giga no subete = National Treasure Frolicking Animals. [Tokyo]: NHK: NHK プロモーション : 朝日新聞社, 2021.

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.