The Poetess Kotaigogu no Daibu

Attributed to Iwasa Matabei and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, this hanging scroll painted in ink and colors on gold-flecked paper depicts Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu, the celebrated late twelfth-century court lady-in-waiting and waka poet whose diary, the Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu Shu, is one of the masterpieces of medieval Japanese literature. Known by her courtly title Kotaigogu no Daibu, she served Empress Kenreimon'in (Taira no Tokuko) and witnessed the catastrophic fall of the Taira clan, an experience that shaped the elegiac character of her surviving poetry. Matabei's depiction places her within the iconographic tradition of the female poetic immortals, a parallel canon to the male Thirty-Six Immortals, and renders her with his signature figural treatment, the broad face and downcast eyes, set against a richly decorative ground enhanced by scattered gold leaf, kirikane and noge, that catches the light in characteristic Momoyama fashion. The gold-flecked paper and the literary subject together demonstrate Matabei's command of the classical yamato-e tradition that he inherited from the Tosa school and his adaptation of it to the slightly looser, more pictorial sensibility of the early Edo period, when classical female literary figures were being reimagined for new patrons.