Gibbons

Gibbons (猿猴図, Enkō-zu) is a 1933 hanging-scroll painting by Hashimoto Kansetsu in ink and color on silk, in the collection of the University Art Museum at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku Daigaku Bijutsukan). The painting belongs to the long and venerable East Asian tradition of gibbon painting, descending from Song-period Chan Buddhist painters such as Muqi, in which the gibbon's reaching, grasping form serves as both a naturalistic subject and a meditation on impermanence and the searching mind. Kansetsu was one of the foremost monkey painters of the modern Japanese nihonga tradition, and Gibbons demonstrates the careful observation of anatomy and posture that he learned from Takeuchi Seihō's Maruyama-Shijō training combined with the psychological depth and ink-painting authority he had absorbed from his study of Song masters during his repeated travels in China. The painting is among the central Kansetsu works in the Tokyo University of the Arts collection.