Monkey

Monkey (猿, Saru) is a 1940 hanging-scroll painting by Hashimoto Kansetsu in ink and color on silk, in the collection of the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane. The painting belongs to the major strand of monkey works that Kansetsu pursued through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, in which the introspective psychology of his animal subjects reached its mature expression. Kansetsu's monkeys, observed from direct studies and from his readings in the Song Chan Buddhist tradition of monkey painting represented by Muqi, are characteristically still, watchful, and self-contained — figures that seem to carry an interior life rather than merely posing in the landscape. The composition demonstrates the careful anatomical observation he had inherited from his Maruyama-Shijō training under Takeuchi Seihō and the spare, atmospheric handling of ink and color that distinguishes his late hanging-scroll work. The painting is part of the Adachi Museum's substantial Kansetsu collection.