Untitled

Ōtagaki Rengetsu

19th century · Hanging scroll; ink, color, and silver on paper · Asian Art

This lightly brushed image of a fox garbed as a Buddhist nun acquires a clever, perhaps personal dimension in the poem that the nun Rengetsu inscribed in her much-admired script. The delicate vivacity of its classic style well suits her vision of a long-standing superstition holding that foxes transform themselves into human form to bewitch the unwary, particularly at twilight. A trickster in Sagano fields at twilight my tail in plumes of grass— Will it look like a sleeve? signed Rengetsu There is a play of word and image elucidated by the donor of this scroll. The word obana, written with characters meaning "tail-flower," is classic poetic diction for autumn plumes of susuki, the tall grasses painted here to signify Sagano, a place name often used in poetry as a pun on saga, "one's nature."

Artist

Ōtagaki Rengetsu

Date

19th century

Medium

Hanging scroll; ink, color, and silver on paper

Culture

Japan

Department

Asian Art

Credit line

Gift of Donald Keene, 1998