46 - JAPAN - Edo Period (1603–1868), 19th century

JAPAN - Edo Period (1603–1868), 19th century Pair of six-panel folding screens, ink on paper, each panel depicting a luohan (rakan) seated in a landscape and accompanied by his attribute. (Damage, losses, restorations, stains). H. 169 cm. Width of one panel: 63 cm These paintings were based on a collection of sixteen works attributed to the Buddhist monk Guanxiu (832–912). The depictions of luohan (Jap. rakan, Sansk. arhat) with extravagant and caricatured features, developed by Guanxiu, have profoundly shaped the history of Chinese painting, inspiring several generations of artists to depict these figures as exotic, extraordinary beings endowed with superhuman qualities. Emperor Qianlong is said to have discovered, in a monastery in Hangzhou, a collection of paintings that he considered to be Guanxiu’s original works. He then had copies carved into stone, from which prints were subsequently produced. The set of sixteen prints is now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (no. 59.195.16) The Japanese copyist Yamana Gikei (1865–?) participated on several occasions in official campaigns to preserve and reproduce ancient paintings and pictorial scrolls, carried out notably under the auspices of imperial institutions, including the Imperial Museum, now the Tokyo National Museum. A set of sixteen paintings based on *Guanxiu* by Yamana Gikei is held in the collections of the Tokyo National Museum (A-5085).