Collaborative Painting of Sixteen Arhats

Collaborative Painting of Sixteen Arhats is a hanging scroll in ink and color on satin, circa 1880, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2020.92). The work is a collaborative composition in which the lead artist Suzuki Hyakunen — Mori Kansai's contemporary on the founding faculty of the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School — assembled contributions from a roster of major late-Meiji Kyoto painters, including Tomioka Tessai, Kōno Bairei, Tanomura Chokunyū, and Mori Kansai himself, each adding a portion of the sixteen-arhat subject to the unified scroll. The arhats (rakan) are the sixteen enlightened disciples of the Buddha who, in East Asian Buddhist iconography, are charged with protecting the Dharma until the arrival of the future Buddha Maitreya; they appear individually or as a group in countless Japanese hanging scrolls, screens, and prints. Collaborative paintings of this kind were common in the late-Meiji Kyoto painting world, both as expressions of social solidarity among the senior painters and as ceremonial commissions, and the Met's example documents Kansai's centrality in the Kyoto painting community in his late career.