Old Monkey with Cherry in Autumn

Old Monkey with Cherry in Autumn (老猿桜秋, Rōen Ōshū) is a 1938 hanging-scroll painting by Hashimoto Kansetsu in ink and color on silk, in the collection of the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, Chiba. The painting unites two of Kansetsu's most characteristic subjects: the monkey, observed with the psychological introspection that marks his animal painting, and the late-autumn cherry — the cherry tree that has lost its blossoms and entered its red and gold foliage phase, a seasonal motif counterposed against the more famous spring cherry. The pairing of an old monkey with autumn cherry carries strong associations of advanced age and reflective experience, and the painting belongs to the cluster of late-career monkey works in which Kansetsu condensed decades of observation into compositions of unhurried, contemplative authority. The work is among the most important Kansetsu paintings in the DIC Kawamura collection and has been documented through the Google Arts & Culture digital program.