Dragons Ascending the Heavens (Hiryū Shōten)

Dragons Ascending the Heavens (Hiryū Shōten, 飛龍昇天) is a single-panel ink painting by Kanō Hōgai dated to about 1887 and held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as part of the Fenollosa-Weld Collection, the great body of late Hōgai work assembled by Ernest Fenollosa and Charles Goddard Weld in the 1880s and bequeathed to the museum in 1911. Measuring approximately 62.4 by 137.9 centimetres, the painting shows a principal dragon ascending vertically through cloud and mist, with the bodies of additional dragons faintly indicated in the upper register as if rising into the sky. The dragon-ascending-heavens subject was a standard Kanō and Zen Buddhist motif signifying spiritual awakening and the transition from the worldly to the transcendent — a particularly resonant theme for a sixty-year-old painter at the close of his career. Hōgai works almost entirely in ink, exploiting graded washes to produce the cloud forms while reserving strong dark strokes for the principal dragon's body, head, and claws. The painting is among the latest Hōgai works in any Western collection and one of the central documents of his collaboration with Fenollosa in the final years of his life.