Hibo Kannon (Avalokiteśvara as a Merciful Mother)

Hibo Kannon (Avalokiteśvara as a Merciful Mother, 悲母観音) is Kanō Hōgai's masterpiece and the single most celebrated painting of early Meiji nihonga. Completed in November 1888, only days before the artist's death at sixty, the work is a tall hanging scroll in ink, colour, and gold on silk, measuring 196 by 86.5 centimetres, and is held by the University Art Museum of the Tokyo University of the Arts — the institutional descendant of the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō that Hōgai, Ernest Fenollosa, and Okakura Kakuzō had together planned. The composition shows the bodhisattva Kannon standing on a lotus throne above a misty mountain landscape, drawing a haloed infant forth from a sphere of light suspended in a vase she holds before her. The iconography is fundamentally Buddhist, but the picture is the founding statement of a new style: Hōgai applies Western anatomical drawing to the bodhisattva's face and hands, models the drapery with light and shadow rather than Kanō brush convention, and sets the figure in an atmospheric landscape with the deep recession of European religious painting. A first version of 1883, purchased directly by Fenollosa and now held by the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington (F1902.225), was exhibited in Paris in the 1880s and helped establish the international reputation of modern Japanese painting; Hōgai then began the present, second version, working on it intermittently through 1885-1888 and completing it on his deathbed. The painting was immediately recognised as the founding document of nihonga and remains the canonical example of the Fenollosa-Hōgai synthesis of Kanō brushwork and Western pictorial language.