Eight Immortals

Eight Immortals is one leaf from an album of fifteen paintings by Mori Kansai given to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 2001 (accession 2001.16B), all executed in ink and color on silk and dated by the painter to 1873. The Eight Immortals (Chinese: Baxian; Japanese: Hassen) are a group of Daoist transcendents — Lü Dongbin, Han Xiangzi, Cao Guojiu, He Xiangu, Lan Caihe, Li Tieguai, Han Zhongli, and Zhang Guolao — who entered the Japanese painting repertoire through Chinese-style learning and became standard subjects for the literati-influenced Kyoto and Osaka painters of the Edo and Meiji periods. Kansai assembles his eight figures in a grouped composition that gives him scope to display the Mori-Kishi school's command of figural drawing and the costume vocabulary expected of Chinese-style subjects. The 1873 date is among the firmest in the artist's known album work and locates the leaf at a key transitional moment in his career, between his pre-Meiji practice and his subsequent role on the founding faculty of the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School from 1880.