Portrait of Chunagon Asatada

This small hanging scroll in the Art Institute of Chicago, painted in ink and color on paper around 1600 and measuring just twenty-eight by thirty-two centimeters, depicts Fujiwara no Asatada, the tenth-century Heian courtier-poet known by the title Chunagon, or middle counselor. Asatada is one of the celebrated Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals (sanjurokkasen), the canonical anthology of classical Japanese poets compiled in the eleventh century and an enduring subject of yamato-e portraiture from the Kamakura period onward. The intimate scale of this work, near miniature in dimension, suggests it may have been one sheet from a complete set of Thirty-Six Immortals portraits, a major genre commission that Matabei executed in several recorded versions including the so-called Doon set now dispersed across multiple collections. The painting demonstrates Matabei's command of the classical poet-portrait convention, where the seated courtier appears in elaborate ceremonial robes against a minimal ground, with his identity carried by a combination of facial features, costume, attribute, and accompanying poetic colophon. Matabei's characteristic facial type, the broad cheeks and downcast eyes, gives Asatada the simultaneously dignified and slightly melancholic presence that distinguished his treatments of the canonical poets.