Archbishop Henjō (Sōjō Henjō zu), from the Dōon Version of the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals

This hanging scroll in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, painted in ink, color, gold, and silver on paper in the 1620s or 1630s, depicts Archbishop Henjo (Sojo Henjo), the celebrated ninth-century Tendai cleric and waka poet who is one of the canonical Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals. The scroll belongs to the so-called Doon set, named for an attached colophon, which is the most important of Matabei's surviving treatments of the Thirty-Six Immortals theme and was originally produced as a complete set of thirty-six independent hanging scrolls, the individual sheets now widely dispersed across Japanese and American collections including the Metropolitan and the Idemitsu Museum. The Met's Henjo sheet exemplifies the ambition of the project, with Matabei's confident hand visible in the seated poet's robed form, the careful inscription of his identifying waka, and the sumptuous ground that combines gold and silver pigments in the kirikane and metallic-leaf vocabulary inherited from medieval Buddhist painting. The portrait demonstrates how Matabei transformed the classical poet-portrait tradition by giving each figure his distinctive face type while preserving the iconographic conventions that allowed contemporary viewers to recognize individual poets by their attributes and inscriptions.