Monkeys at Play

Monkeys at Play is a [diptych](/glossary/diptych) of hanging scrolls in ink and color on silk by Mori Sosen (森狙仙, 1747-1821), held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accessions 14.76.17 and 14.76.18). The museum dates the pair to the late eighteenth century, before 1807, placing them within Sosen's mature period as the leading Osaka animal painter. Each scroll measures 67.9 by 15.9 cm in the image — narrow vertical formats designed to hang as a paired set in a tokonoma or other display alcove. Diptych compositions of this kind allowed Sosen to spread a monkey troop's social interactions across two related fields: animals reaching, leaping, or grooming between branches on the left scroll respond to figures grouped on the right, the eye traveling between the two as it would between actors on a stage. Working in the Maruyama-Shijō tradition founded by Maruyama Ōkyo, Sosen built such compositions from accumulated life sketches of Japanese macaques observed in his Osaka studio and on travel to mountain districts. The Metropolitan's pair is in the public domain through the museum's open-access program.