Dedication of Lanterns

Dedication of Lanterns (Tōrō kuyō, 灯籠供養) is a six-panel folding screen by Kikuchi Keigetsu, completed in 1910 in ink and color on paper and now held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The work depicts a Buddhist lantern-offering ceremony — most likely the August Obon rite at which paper and stone lanterns are dedicated to the spirits of the ancestors — set within a temple precinct rendered in the precise architectural observation characteristic of Kyoto nihonga. Keigetsu treats the subject as a procession of robed figures moving from right to left across the panels, each carrying or attending to a lantern, with the soft graded colour and atmospheric ground of his Maruyama-Shijō training. The screen was shown at the fourth Bunten in 1910 and was acquired by the predecessor of the National Museum of Modern Art as a representative example of contemporary Kyoto large-format painting; it remains one of the most reproduced of Keigetsu's middle-period screens and demonstrates the synthesis of Buddhist subject, classical figural drawing, and atmospheric handling that defined his idiom in the years immediately before the First World War.